
Glass. 
Book, 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



FATHER AND SON 

BIOGRAPHICAL RECOLLECTIONS 



" Der Glaube ist wie die Liebe : er lasst sich nicht 
erzwingren." 

SCHOPENHADEB 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1907 



1^^ ;.. . ••^^.'ceicw 

Coovri(«*»» Entry _ 
cuss A :<Xc, Nb. 






Ck>PTBiOHa 1907 by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published October 1907 




3^ 



PREFACE 

At the present hour, when fiction takes forms 
so ingenious and so specious, it is perhaps neces- 
sary to say that the following narrative, in all its 
parts, and so far as the punctihous attention of 
the writer has been able to keep it so, is scru- 
pulously true. If it were not true, in this strict 
sense, to pubhsh it would be to trifle with all 
those who may be induced to read it. It is offered 
to them as a document, as a record of educational 
and rehgious conditions which, having passed 
away, will never return. In this respect, as the 
diagnosis of a dying Puritanism, it is hoped that 
the narrative will not be altogether without sig- 
nificance. 

It offers, too, in a subsidiary sense, a study of 
the development of moral and intellectual ideas 
during the progress of infancy. These have been 
closely and conscientiously noted, and may have 
some value in consequence of the unusual con- 
ditions in which they were produced. The au- 



PREFACE 

thor has observed that those who have written 
about the facts of their own childhood have usu- 
ally delayed to note them down until age has 
dimmed their recollections. Perhaps an even 
more common fault in such autobiographies is that 
they are sentimental, and are falsified by self- 
admiration and self-pity. The writer of these 
recollections has thought that if the examination 
of his earhest years was to be undertaken at all, 
it should be attempted while his memory is still 
perfectly vivid and while he is still imbiased by 
the forgetfulness or the sensibiHty of advancing 
years. 

At one point only has there been any tamper- 
ing with precise fact. It is beheved that, with the 
exception of the son, there is but one person 
mentioned in this book who is still ahve. Never- 
theless, it has been thought well, in order to avoid 
any appearance of offence, to alter the majority of 
the proper names of the private persons spoken of. 

As regards the anonymous writer himself, 
whether the reader does or does not recognise 
an old acquaintance, occasionally met with in 
quite other fields, is a matter of no importance. 
Here no effort has been made to conceal or to 
identify. 

It is not usual, perhaps, that the narrative of 
a spiritual struggle should mingle merriment 



PREFACE 

and humour with a discussion of the most solemn 
subjects. It has, however, been inevitable that 
they should be so mingled in this narrative. It 
is true that most funny books try to be funny 
throughout, while theology is scandalised if it 
awakens a single smile. But hfe is not consti- 
tuted thus, and this book is nothing if it is not 
a genuine sHce of hfe. There was an extraor- 
dinary mixture of comedy and tragedy in the situ- 
ation which is here described, and those who are 
affected by the pathos of it will not need to have 
it explained to them that the comedy was super- 
ficial and the tragedy essential. 

September, 1907. 



CHAPTER I 

This book is the record of a struggle between two 
temperaments, two consciences and almost two 
epochs. It ended, as was inevitable, in disruption. 
Of the two human beings here described, one was 
born to fly backward, the other could not help 
being carried forward. There came a time when 
neither spoke the same language as the other, or 
encompassed the same hopes, or was fortified by 
the same desires. But, at least, it is some conso- 
lation to the survivor, that neither, to the very 
last hour, ceased to respect the other, or to regard 
him with a sad indulgence. The affection of these 
two persons was assailed by forces in comparison 
with which the changes that health or fortune or 
place introduce are as nothing. It is a mournful 
satisfaction, but yet a satisfaction, that they were 
both of them able to obey the law which says 
that ties of close family relationship must be hon- 
oured and sustained. Had it not been so, this 
story would never have been told. 
1 



FATHER AND SON 

The struggle began soon, yet of course it did 
not begin in early infancy. But to familiarise my 
readers with the conditions of the two persons 
(which were unusual) and with the outlines of 
their temperaments (which were, perhaps innate- 
ly, antagonistic), it is needful to open with some 
accoimt of all that I can truly and independently 
recollect, as well as with some statements which 
are, as will be obvious, due to household tradition. 

My parents were poor gentlefolks; not young; 
sohtary, sensitive and, although they did not know 
it, proud. They both belonged to what is called 
the Middle Class, and there was this further re- 
semblance between them that they each descended 
from famihes which had been more than well-to- 
do in the eighteenth century, and had gradually 
sunken in fortune. In both houses there had been 
a decay of energy which had led to decay in wealth. 
In the case of my Father's family it had been 
a slow dechne; in that of my Mother's, it had 
been rapid. My maternal grandfather was born 
wealthy, and in the opening years of the nine- 
teenth century, immediately after his marriage, 
he bought a little estate in North Wales, on the 
slopes of Snowdon. Here he seems to have hved 
in a pretentious way, keeping a pack of hounds 
and entertaining on an extravagant scale. He 
had a wife who encouraged him in this vivid hfe, 
2 



FATHER AND SON 

and three children, my Mother and her two 
brothers. His best trait was his devotion to the 
education of his children, in which he proclaimed 
himself a disciple of Rousseau. But he can 
hardly have followed the teaching of ''Emile" 
very closely, since he employed tutors to teach 
his daughter, at an extremely early age, the very 
subjects which Rousseau forbade, such as his- 
tory, literature and foreign langua.ges. 

My Mother was his special favourite, and his 
vanity did its best to make a blue-stocking of 
her. She read Greek, Latin and even a little 
Hebrew, and, what was more important, her mind 
was trained to be self-supporting. But she was 
diametrically opposed in essential matters to her 
easy-going, luxurious and self-indulgent parents. 
Reviewing her hfe in her thirtieth year, she re- 
marked in some secret notes: ''I cannot recollect 
the time when I did not love rehgion." She used 
a still more remarkable expression: "If I must 
date my conversion from my first wish and trial 
to be holy, I may go back to infancy; if I am 
to postpone it till after my last wilful sin, it is 
scarcely yet begun." The irregular pleasures of 
her parents' hfe were deeply distasteful to her, 
as such were to many young persons in those days 
of the wide revival of Conscience, and when my 
grandfather, by his reckless expenditure, which 
3 



FATHER AND SON 

he never checked till riiin was upon him, was 
obliged to sell his estate, and live in penury, 
my Mother was the only member of the family 
who did not regret the change. For my own 
part, I believe I should have liked my reprobate 
maternal grandfather, but his conduct was cer- 
tainly very vexatious. He died, in his eightieth 
year, when I was nine months old. 

It was a curious coincidence that life had 
brought both my parents along similar paths 
to an almost identical position in respect to 
religious belief. She had started from the Angli- 
can standpoint, he from the Wesleyan, and 
each, almost without counsel from others, and 
after varied theological experiments, had come 
to take up precisely the same attitude towards 
all divisions of the Protestant Church, that, 
namely, of detached and unbiassed contempla- 
tion. So far as the sects agreed with my Father 
and my Mother, the sects were walking in the 
light; wherever they differed from them, they 
had slipped more or less definitely into a penum- 
bra of their own making, a darkness into which 
neither of my parents would follow them. Hence, 
by a process of selection, my Father and my 
Mother alike had gradually, without violence, 
foimd themselves shut outside all Protestant 
communions, and at last they met only with a 
4 



FATHER AND SON 

few extreme Calvinists like themselves, on terms 
of what may almost be called negation — with 
no priest, no ritual, no festivals, no ornament of 
any kind, nothing but the Lord's Supper and the 
exposition of Holy Scripture drawing these austere 
spirits into any sort of cohesion. They called 
themselves 'Hhe Brethren," simply; a title 
enlarged by the world outside into 'Tlymouth 
Brethren." 

It was accident and similarity which brought 
my parents together at these meetings of the 
Brethren. Each was lonely, each was poor, 
each was accustomed to a strenuous intellectual 
self-support. He was nearly thirty-eight, she 
was past forty- two, when they married. From 
a suburban lodging, he brought her home to 
his mother's little house in the north-east of 
London without a single day's honeymoon. 
My Father was a zoologist, and a writer of books 
on natural history; my Mother also was a writer, 
author already of two slender volumes of religious 
verse — the earlier of which, I know not how, 
must have enjoyed some slight success, since a 
second edition was printed — afterwards she de- 
voted her pen to popular works of edification. 
But how infinitely removed in their aims, their 
habits, their ambitions from ''literary" people 
of the present day, words are scarcely adequate 
5 



FATHER AND SON 

to describe. Neither knew nor cared about any 
manifestation of current literature. For each 
there had been no poet later than Byron, and 
neither had read a romance since, in childhood, 
they had dipped into the Waverley Novels as 
they appeared in succession. For each the var- 
ious forms of imaginative and scientific literature 
were merely means of improvement and profit, 
which kept the student ''out of the world," 
gave him full employment, and enabled him to 
maintain himself. But pleasure was found no- 
where but in the Word of God, and to the end- 
less discussion of the Scriptures each hurried when 
the day's work was over. 

In this strange household the advent of a 
child was not welcomed, but was borne with 
resignation. The event was thus recorded in 
my Father's diary: 

''E. delivered of a son. Received green swal- 
low from Jamaica." 

This entry has caused amusement, as showing 
that he was as much interested in the bird as 
in the boy. But this does not follow; what 
the wording exemplifies is my Father's extreme 
punctilio. The green swallow arrived later in 
the day than the son, and the earlier visitor 
was therefore recorded first; my Father was 
scrupulous in every species of arrangement. 
6 



FATHER AND SON 

Long afterwards, my Father told me that my 
Mother suffered much in giving birth to me, and 
that, uttering no cry, I appeared to be dead. 
I was- laid, with scant care, on another bed in 
the room, while all anxiety and attention were 
concentrated on my Mother. An old woman who 
happened to be there, and who was unemployed, 
turned her thoughts to me, and tried to awake 
in me a spark of vitality. She succeeded, and 
she was afterwards complimented by the doctor 
on her cleverness. My Father could not — when 
he told me the story — recollect the name of my 
preserver. I have often longed to know who 
she was. For all the rapture of life, for all its 
turmoils, its anxious desires, its manifold pleas- 
ures, and even for its sorrow and suffering, I 
bless and praise that anonjrmous old lady from 
the bottom of my heart. 

It was six weeks before my Mother was able 
to leave her room. The occasion was made a 
solemn one, and was attended by a species of 
Churching. Mr. Balfour, an aged minister of 
the denomination, held a private service in the 
parlour, and 'Sprayed for our child, that he 
may be the Lord's." This was the opening act 
of that "dedication" which was never hence- 
forward forgotten, and of which the following 
pages will endeavour to describe the results. 
7 



FATHER AND SON 

Around my tender and unconscious spirit was 
flung the luminous web, the Ught and elastic 
but impermeable veil, which it was hoped would 
keep me ''unspotted from the world." 

Until this time my Father's mother had lived 
in the house and taken the domestic charges 
of it on her own shoulders. She now consented 
to leave us to ourselves. There is no question 
that her exodus was a relief to my Mother, since 
my paternal grandmother was a strong and 
masterful woman, buxom, choleric and practical, 
for whom the interests of the mind did not exist. 
Her daughter-in-law, gentle as she was, and 
ethereal in manner and appearance — strangely 
contrasted (no doubt), in her tinctures of gold 
hair and white skin, with my grandmother's 
bold carnations and black tresses — was yet 
possessed of a will like tempered steel. They 
were better friends apart, with my grandmother 
lodged hard by, in a bright room, her household 
gods and bits of excellent eighteenth-century 
fm-niture aromid her, her miniatures and spar- 
kling china arranged on the shelves. 

Left to my Mother's sole care, I became the 
centre of her sohcitude. But there mingled 
with those happy animal instincts wliich sustain 
the strength and patience of every human mother, 
and were fully present with her — there mingled 
8 



FATHER AND SON 

with these certain spiritual determinations which 
can be but rare. They are, in their outline, I 
suppose, vaguely common to many religious 
mothers, but there are few indeed who fill up 
the sketch with so firm a detail as she did. Once 
again I am indebted to her secret notes, in a 
little locked volume, seen until now, nearly 
sixty years later, by no eye save her own. Thus 
she wrote when I was two months old: 

"We have given him to the Lord; and we 
trust that He will really manifest him to be 
His own, if he grow up; and if the Lord take 
him early, we will not doubt that he is taken 
to Himself. Only, if it please the Lord to take 
him, I do trust we may be spared seeing him 
suffering in lingering illness and much pain. 
But in this as in all things His will is better 
than what we can choose. Whether his life 
be prolonged or not, it has already been a blessing 
to us, and to the saints, in leading us to much 
prayer, and bringing us into varied need and 
some trial." 

The last sentence is somewhat obscure to me. 

How, at that tender age, I contrived to be a 

blessing "to the saints" may surprise others 

and puzzles myself. But "the saints" was the 

9 



FATHER AND SON 

habitual term by which were indicated the friends 
who met on Sunday mornings for Holy Com- 
munion, and at many other times in the week 
for prayer and discussion of the Scriptures, in 
the small hired hall at Hackney, which my 
parents attended. I suppose that the solemn 
dedication of me to the Lord, which was re- 
peated in pubUc in my Mother's arms, being by 
no means a usual or familiar ceremony even 
among the Brethren, created a certain curiosity 
and fervour in the immediate services, or was 
imagined so to do by the fond, partial heart of 
my Mother. She, however, who had been so 
much isolated, now made the care of her child 
an excuse for retiring still further into silence. 
With those religious persons who met at the 
Room, as the modest chapel was called, she had 
little spiritual and no intellectual sympathy. 
She noted: 

'^I do not think it would increase my happi- 
ness to be in the midst of the saints at Hackney. 
I have made up my mind to give myself up to 
Baby for the winter, and to accept no invitations. 
To go when I can to the Sunday morning meet- 
ings and to see my own Mother." 

The monotony of her existence now became 
10 



FATHER AND SON 

extreme, but she seems to have been happy. 
Her days were spent in taking care of me, and 
in directing, one young servant. My Father 
was for ever in his study, writing, drawing, 
dissecting; sitting, no doubt, as I grew after- 
wards accustomed to see him, absolutely motion- 
less, with his eye glued to the microscope, for 
twenty minutes at a time. So the greater part 
of every week-day was spent, and on Sunday 
he usually preached one, and sometimes two 
extempore sermons. His work-day labours were 
rewarded by the praise of the learned world, 
to which he was indifferent, but by very little 
money, which he needed more. For over three 
years after their marriage, neither of my parents 
left London for a single day, not being able to 
afford to travel. They received scarcely any 
visitors, never ate a meal away from home, never 
spent an evening in social intercourse abroad. 
At night they discussed theology, read aloud to 
one another, or translated scientific brochures 
from French or German. It sounds a terrible 
hfe of pressure and deprivation, and that it was 
physically unwholesome there can be no shadow 
of a doubt. But their contentment was com- 
plete and unfeigned. In the midst of this, 
materially, the hardest moment of their hves, 
when I was one year old, and there was a question 
11 



FATHER AND SON 

of oiir leaving London, my Mother recorded in 
her secret notes: — 

''We are happy and contented, having all 
things needful and pleasant, and our present 
habitation is hallowed by many sweet associa- 
tions. We have our house to ourselves and 
enjoy each other's society. If we move we 
shall no longer be alone. The situation may be 
more favourable, however, for Baby, as being 
more in the country. I desire to have no choice 
in the matter, but as I know not what would 
be for our good, and God knows, so I desire to 
leave it with Him, and if it is not His will we 
should move. He will raise objections and diffi- 
culties, and if it is His will He will make Henry 
[my Father] desirous and anxious to take the 
step, and then, whatever the result, let us leave 
all to Him and not regret it." 

No one who is acquainted with the human 
heart will mistake this attitude of resignation for 
weakness of purpose. It was not poverty of will, 
it was abnegation, it was a voluntary act. My 
Mother, underneath an exquisite amenity of 
manner, concealed a rigour of spirit which took 
the form of a constant self-denial. For it to 
dawn upon her consciousness that she wished 
12 



FATHER AND SON 

for something, was definitely to renounce that 
wish, or, more exactly, to subject it in everything 
to what she' conceived to be the will of God. 
This is perhaps the right moment for me to say 
that at this time, and indeed until the hour 
of her death, she exercised, without suspecting 
it, a magnetic power over the will and nature of 
my Father^ Both were strong, but my Mother 
was unquestionably the stronger of the two; 
it was her mind which gradually drew his to take 
up a certain definite position, and this remained 
permanent although she, the cause of it, was 
early removed. Hence, while it was with my 
Father that the long struggle which I have to 
narrate took place, behind my Father stood the 
ethereal memory of my Mother's will, guiding 
him, pressing him, holding him to the unswerv- 
ing purpose which she had formed and defined. 
And when the inevitable disruption came, what 
was unspeakably painful was to reahse that it 
was not from one, but from both parents that 
the purpose of the child was separated. 

My Mother was a Puritan in grain, and never 
a word escaped from her, not a phrase exists in 
her diary, to suggest that she had any privations 
to put up with. She seemed strong and well, 
and so did I; the one of us who broke down 
was my Father. With his attack of acute nervous 
13 



FATHER AND SON 

dyspepsia came an unexpected small accession 
of money, and we were able, in my third year, to 
take a holiday of nearly ten months in Devonshire. 
The extreme seclusion, the unbroken strain, were 
never repeated, and when we returned to London, 
it was to conditions of greater amenity and to a 
less rigid practice of ''the world forgetting by 
the world forgot." That this relaxation was 
more relative than positive, and that nothing 
ever really tempted either of my parents from 
their cavern in an intellectual Thebaid, my 
recollections will amply prove. But each of 
them was forced by circumstances into a more 
or less public position, and neither could any 
longer quite ignore the world around. 

It is not my business here to re-write the 
biographies of my parents. Each of them be- 
came, in a certain measure, celebrated, and 
each was the subject of a good deal of contem- 
porary discussion. Each was prominent before 
the eyes of a public of his or her own, half a cen- 
tury ago. It is because their minds were vigor- 
ous and their accomplishments distinguished that 
the contrast between their spiritual point of view 
and the aspect of a similar class of persons to-day 
is interesting and may, I hope, be instructive. 
But this is not another memoir of public indi- 
viduals, each of whom has had more than one 
14 



FATHER AND SON 

biographer. My serious duty, as I venture to 
hold it, is other; 

that's the world's side, 
Thus men saw them, praised them, thought they knew them I 
There, in turn, I stood aside and praised them I 
Out of my own self I dare to phrase it. 

But this is a different inspection, this is a 
study of 

the other side, the novel 
Silent silver lights and darks imdreamed of, 

the record of a state of soul once not uncommon 
in Protestant Europe, of which my parents were 
perhaps the latest consistent exemplars among 
people of light and leading. 

The peculiarities of a family life, founded 
upon such principles, are, in relation to a little 
child, obvious; but I may be permitted to re- 
capitulate them. Here was perfect purity, per- 
fect intrepidity, perfect abnegation; yet there 
was also narrowness, isolation, an absence of 
perspective, let it be boldly admitted, an absence 
of humanity. And there was a curious mixture 
of humbleness and arrogance; entire resignation 
to the will of God and not less entire disdain of 
the judgment and opinion of man. My parents 
foimded every action, every attitude, upon their 
interpretation of the Scriptures, and upon the 
15 



FATHER AND SON 

guidance of the Divine Will as revealed to them 
by direct answer to prayer. Their ejaculation 
in the face of any dilemma was, ''Let us cast it 
before the Lord!" 

So confident were they of the reality of their 
intercourse with God, that they asked for no 
other guide. They recognised no spiritual author- 
ity among men, they subjected themselves to 
no priest or minister, they troubled their con- 
sciences about no current manifestation of ''re- 
ligious opinion." They lived in an intellectual 
cell, boimded at its sides by the walls of their 
own house, but open above to the very heart of 
the uttermost heavens. 

This, then, was the scene in which the soul 
of a Httle child was planted, not as in an ordinary 
open flower-border or carefully tended social 
parterre, but as on a ledge, split in the granite 
of some mountain. The ledge was hung between 
night and the snows on one hand, and the dizzy 
depths of the world upon the other; was fur- 
nished with just soil enough for a gentian to 
struggle skywards and open its stiff azure stars; 
and offered no lodgement, no hope of salvation, to 
any rootlet which should stray beyond its inex- 
orable limits. 



16 



CHAPTER II 

Out of the darkness of my infancy there comes 
only one flash of memory. I am seated alone, 
in my baby-chair, at a dinner-table set for several 
people. Somebody brings in a leg of mutton, 
puts it down close to me, and goes out. I am 
again alone, gazing at two low windows, wide 
open upon a garden. Suddenly, noiselessly, a 
large, long animal (obviously a greyhound) 
appears at one window-sill, slips into the room, 
seizes the leg of mutton and shps out again. 
When this happened I could not yet talk. The 
accomphshment of speech came to me very 
late, doubtless because I never heard young 
voices. Many years later, when I mentioned 
this recollection, there was a shout of laughter 
and surprise: — 

''That, then, was what became of the mutton! 
It was not you, who, as your Uncle A. pretended, 
ate it up, in the twinkling of an eye, bone and 
all!" 

17 



FATHER AND SON 

I suppose that it was the starthng intensity 
of this incident which stamped it upon a memory 
from which all other impressions of this early 
date have vanished. 

The adventure of the leg of mutton occurred, 
evidently, at the house of my Mother's brothers, 
for my parents, at this date, visited no other. 
My imcles were not religious men, but they had 
an almost filial respect for my Mother, who was 
several years senior to the elder of them. When 
the catastrophe of my grandfather's fortune had 
occurred, they had not yet left school. My 
Mother, in spite of an extreme dislike of teaching, 
which was native to her, immediately accepted 
the situation of a governess in the family of an 
Irish nobleman. The mansion was only to be 
approached, as Miss Edgeworth would have 
said, "through eighteen sloughs, at the imminent 
peril of one's Ufe," and when one had reached it, 
the mixture of opulence and squalour, of civility 
and savagery, was unspeakable. But my Mother 
was well paid, and she stayed in this distasteful 
environment, doing the work she hated most, 
while with the margin of her salary she helped 
first one of her brothers and then the other 
through his Cambridge course. They studied 
hard and did well at the university. At length 
their sister received, in her ultima Thule, news 
18 



FATHER AND SON 

that her younger brother had taken his degree, 
and then and there, with a sigh of intense rehef, 
she resigned her situation and came straight 
back to England. 

It is not to be wondered at, then, that my 
uncles looked up to their sister with feelings of 
especial devotion. They were not inclined, they 
were hardly in a position, to criticise her modes 
of thought. They were easy-going, cultured 
and kindly gentlemen, rather limited in their 
views, without a trace of their sister's force of 
intellect or her strenuous temper. E. resembled 
her in person; he was tall, fair, with auburn 
curls; he cultivated a certain tendency to the 
Byronic type, fatal and melancholy. A. was 
short, brown and jocose, with a pretension to 
common sense; bluff and chatty. As a httle 
child, I adored my Uncle E., who sat silent by 
the fireside, holding me against his knee, saying 
nothing, but looking unutterably sad, and oc- 
casionally shaking his warm-coloured tresses. 
With great injustice, on the other hand, I de- 
tested my Uncle A., because he used to joke in a 
manner very displeasing to me, and because he 
would so far forget himself as to chase, and even, 
if it will be credited, to tickle me. My uncles, 
who remained bachelors to the end of their lives, 
earned a comfortable hving, E. by teaching, 
19 



FATHER AND SON 

A. as ''something in the City," and they rented 
an old rambhng house in Chipton, that same in 
which I saw the greyhound. Their house had a 
strange, dehcious smell, so unlike anything I 
smelt anywhere else, that it used to fill my eyes 
with tears of mysterious pleasm-e. I know now 
that this was the odour of cigars, tobacco being 
a species of incense tabooed at home on the 
highest religious grounds. 

It has been recorded that I was slow in learning 
to speak. I used to be told that having met all 
invitations to repeat such words as "Papa" 
and "]\Iamma" wdth gravity and indifference, 
I one day drew towards me a volume, and said 
"book" with startling distinctness. I was not 
at all precocious, but at a rather early age, I 
think towards the beginning of my fourth year, 
I learned to read. I cannot recollect a time 
when a printed page of English was closed to 
me. But perhaps earUer still my Mother used 
to repeat to me a poem which I have always 
taken for granted that she had herself composed, 
a poem which had a romantic place in my early 
mental history. It ran thus, I think: 

O pretty Moon, you shine so bright! 
I'll go to bid Mamma good-night, 
And then I'll lie upon my bed 
And watch you move above my head. 
20 



FATHER AND SON 

Ah! there, a cloud has hidden you! 
But I can see your light shine thro'! 
It tries to liide you — quite in vain, 
For — there you quickly come again! 



It's God, I know, that makes you shine 
Upon this little bed of mine; 
But I shall all about you know 
When I can read and older grow. 

Long, long after the last line had become 
an anachronism, I used to shout this poem 
from my bed before I went to sleep, whether 
the night happened to be moon-Ut or no. 

It must have been my Father who taught me 
my letters. To my Mother, as I have said, it was 
distasteful to teach, though she was so prompt 
and skilful to learn. My Father, on the contrary, 
taught cheerfully, by fits and starts. In partic- 
ular, he had a scheme for rationalising geography, 
which I think was admirable. I was to climb 
upon a chair, while, standing at my side, with a 
pencil and a sheet of paper, he was to draw a 
chart of the markings on the carpet. Then, when 
I understood the system, another chart on a 
smaller scale of the furniture in the room, then of 
a floor of the house, then of the back-garden, then 
of a section of the street. The result of this was 
that geography came to me of itself, as a perfectly 
natural miniature arrangement of objects, and to 
21 



FATHER AND SON 

this day has always been the science which gives 
me least difficulty. My Father also taught me the 
simple rules of arithmetic, a little natural history, 
and the elements of drawing; and he laboured 
long and unsuccessfully to make me learn by 
heart hymns, psalms and chapters of Scripture, in 
which I always failed ignominiously and with 
tears. This puzzled and vexed him, for he 
himself had an extremely retentive textual 
memory. He could not help thinking that I 
was naughty, and would not learn the chapters, 
until at last he gave up the effort. All this 
sketch of an education began, I beheve, in my 
fourth year, and was not advanced or modified 
during the rest of my Mother's life. 

Meanwhile, capable as I was of reading, I 
found my greatest pleasure in the pages of books. 
The range of these was limited, for story-books 
of every description were sternly excluded. 
No fiction of any kind, religious or secular, was 
admitted into the house. In this it was to my 
Mother, not to my Father, that the prohibition 
was due. She had a remarkable, I confess to me 
still somewhat unaccountable impression, that to 
"tell a story," that is, to compose fictitious 
narrative of any kind, was a sin. She carried 
this conviction to extreme lengths. My Father, 
in later years, gave me some interesting examples 
22 



FATHER AND SON 

of her firmness. As a young man in America, 
he had been deeply impressed by ''Salathiel," 
a pious prose romance of that then popular 
writer, the Rev. George Croly. When he first 
met my Mother, he recommended it to her, but 
she would not consent to open it. Nor would 
she read the chivalrous tales in verse of Sir Walter 
Scott, obstinately alleging that they were not 
''true." She would read none but Ijo-ical and 
subjective poetry. Her secret diary reveals the 
history of this singular aversion to the fictitious, 
although it cannot be said to explain the cause 
of it. As a child, however, she had possessed a 
passion for making up stories, and so considerable 
a skill in it that she was constantly being begged 
to indulge others with its exercise. But I will, 
on so curious a point, leave her to speak for her- 
self: 

''When I was a very Httle child, I used to 
amuse myself and my brothers with inventing 
stories, such as I read. Having, as I suppose, 
naturally a restless mind and busy imagination, 
this soon became the chief pleasure of my life. 
Unfortunately, my brothers were always fond 
of encouraging this propensity, and I found in 
Taylor, my maid, a still greater tempter. I 
had not known there was any harm in it, until 
23 



FATHER AND SON 

Miss Shore [a Calvinist governess], finding it 
out, lectured me severely, and told me it was 
wicked. From that time forth I considered 
that to invent a story of any kind was a sin. 
But the desire to do so was too deeply rooted 
in my affection to be resisted in my own strength 
[she was at that time nine years of age], and un- 
fortunately I knew neither my corruption nor 
my weakness, nor did I know where to gain 
strength. The longing to invent stories grew 
with violence; everything I heard or read be- 
came food for my distemper. The simplicity of 
truth was not sufficient for me; I must needs 
embroider imagination upon it, and the folly, 
vanity and wickedness which disgraced my heart 
are more than I am able to express. Even now 
[at the age of twenty-nine], though watched, 
prayed and striven against, this is still the sin 
that most easily besets me. It has hindered my 
prayers and prevented my improvement, and 
therefore has humbled me very much." 

This is, surely, a very painful instance of the 
repression of an instinct. There seems to have 
been, in this case, a vocation such as is rarely 
heard, and still less often wilfully disregarded 
and silenced. Was my Mother intended by 
nature to be a novelist? I have often thought 
24 



FATHER AND SON 

so, and her talents and vigour of purpose, directed 
along the line which was ready to form ''the 
chief pleasure of her hfe/' could hardly have 
failed to conduct her to great success. She 
was a little younger than Bulwer Lytton, a httle 
older than Mrs. Gaskell, — but these are vain and 
trivial speculations! 

My own state, however, was, I should think, 
almost unique among the children of cultivated 
parents. In consequence of the stern ordinance 
which I have described, not a single fiction was 
read or told to me during my infancy. The 
rapture of the child who delays the process 
of going to bed by cajoling "a story" out of his 
mother or his nurse, as he sits upon her knee, 
well tucked up, at the corner of the nursery fire, — 
this was unknown to me. Never, in all my early 
childhood, did any one address to me the affecting 
preamble, "Once upon a time!" I was told 
about missionaries, but never about pirates; 
I was famihar with humming-birds, but I had 
never heard of fairies. Jack the Giant-Killer, 
Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of 
my acquaintance, and though I understood about 
wolves, Little Red Ridinghood was a stranger 
even by name. So far as my "dedication" was 
concerned, I can but think that my parents were 
in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my 
25 



FATHER AND SON 

outlook upon facts. They desired to make me 
truthful; the tendency was to make me positive 
and sceptical. Had they wrapped me in the 
soft folds of supernatural fancy, my mind might 
have been longer content to follow their traditions 
in an unquestioning spirit. 

Having easily said what, in those early years, 
I did not read, I have great difficulty in saying 
what I did read. But a queer variety of natural 
history, some of it quite indigestible by my un- 
developed mind; many books of travels, mainly 
of a scientific character, among them voyages of 
discovery in the South Seas, by which my brain 
was dimly filled with splendour; some geography 
and astronomy, both of them sincerely enjoyed; 
much theology, which I desired to appreciate but 
could never get my teeth into (if I may venture 
to say so), and over which my eye and tongue 
learned to slip without penetrating, so that I 
would read, and read aloud, and with great 
propriety of emphasis, page after page without 
having formed an idea or retained an expression. 
There was, for instance, a writer on prophecy 
called Jukes, of whose works each of my parents 
was inordinately fond, and I was early set to 
read Jukes aloud to them. I did it glibly, like 
a machine, but the sight of Jukes's volumes 
became an abomination to me, and I never 
26 



FATHER AND SON 

formed the outline of a notion what they were 
about. Later on, a publication called ''The 
Penny Cyclopaedia" became my daily, and for 
a long time almost my sole study; to the subject 
of this remarkable work I may presently return. 
It is difficult to keep anything hke chrono- 
logical order in recording fragments of early 
recollection, and in speaking of my reading I 
have been led too far ahead. My memory does 
not, practically, begin till we returned from 
certain visits, made with a zoological purpose, 
to the shores of Devon and Dorset, and settled, 
early in my fifth year, in a house at Islington, 
in the north of London. Our circumstances 
were now more easy; my Father had regular 
and well-paid literary work; and the house was 
larger and more comfortable than ever before, 
though still very simple and restricted. My 
memories, some of which are exactly dated by 
certain facts, now become clear and almost 
abundant. What I do not remember, except 
from having it very often repeated to me, is 
what may be considered the only "clever" thing 
that I said during an otherwise unillustrious 
childhood. It was not startlingly "clever," but 
it may pass. A lady — when I was just four — 
rather injudiciously showed me a large print of 
a human skeleton, saying "There! you don't 
27 



FATHER AND SON 

know what that is, do you?" Upon which, 
immediately and very archly, I replied, ''Isn't 
it a man with the meat off?" This was thought 
wonderful, and, as it is supposed that I had never 
had the phenomenon explained to me, it certainly 
displays some quickness in seizing an analogy. 
I had often watched my Father, while he soaked 
the flesh off the bones of fishes and small mam- 
mals. If I venture to repeat this trifle, it is 
only to point out that the system on which I 
was being educated deprived all things, human 
hfe among the rest, of their mystery. The 
"bare-grinning skeleton of death" was to me 
merely a prepared specimen of that featherless 
plantigrade vertebrate, homo sapiens. 

As I have said that this anecdote was thought 
worth repeating, I ought to proceed to say 
that there was, so far as I can recollect, none 
of that flattery of childhood which is so often 
merely a backhanded way of indulging the 
vanity of parents. My Mother, indeed, would 
hardly have been human if she had not occa- 
sionally entertained herself with the delusion 
that her solitary duckling was a cygnet. This 
my Father did not encourage, remarking, with 
great affection, and chucking me under the 
chin, that I was "a nice little ordinary boy." 
My Mother, stung by this want of appreciation, 
28 



FATHER AND SON 

would proceed so far as to declare that she 
beheved that in future times the F.R.S. would 
be chiefly known as his son's father! (This is a 
pleasantry frequent in professional famihes.) 
To this my Father, whether convinced or not, 
would make no demur, and the couple would 
begin to discuss, in my presence, the direction 
which my shining talents would take. In conse- 
quence of my dedication to ^Hhe Lord's Service," 
the range of possibilities was much restricted. 
My Father, who had lived long in the Tropics, and 
who nursed a perpetual nostalgia for ''the httle 
lazy isles where the trumpet-orchids blow," 
leaned towards the field of missionary labour. 
My Mother, who was cold about foreign missions, 
preferred to believe that I should be the Charles 
Wesley of my age, ''or perhaps," she had the 
candour to admit, "merely the George White- 
field." I cannot recollect the time when I did not 
understand that I was going to be a minister 
of the Gospel. 

It is so generally taken for granted that a 
life strictly dedicated to religion is stiff and 
dreary, that I may have some difficulty in per- 
suading my readers that, as a matter of fact, 
in these early days of my childhood, before 
disease and death had penetrated to our slender 
society, we were always cheerful and often gay. 
29 



FATHER AND SON 

My parents were playful with one another, and 
there were certain stock family jests which seldom 
failed to enliven the breakfast table. My Father 
and Mother lived so completely in the atmosphere 
of faith, and were so utterly convinced of their 
intercourse with God, that, so long as that inter- 
course was not clouded by sin, to which they 
were delicately sensitive, they could afford to 
take the passing hour very lightly. They would 
even, to a certain extent, treat the surroundings 
of their religion as a subject of jest, joking very 
mildly and gently about such things as an atti- 
tude at prayer or the nature of a suppHcation. 
They were absolutely indifferent to forms. They 
prayed, seated in their chairs, as willingly as, 
reversed, upon their knees; no ritual having any 
significance for them. My Mother was sometimes 
extremely gay, laughing with a soft, merry sound. 
What I have since been told of the guileless mirth 
of nuns in a convent has reminded me of the gaiety 
of my parents during my early childhood. 

So long as I was a mere part of them, without 
individual existence, and swept on, a satellite, 
in their atmosphere, I was mirthful when they 
were mirthful, and grave when they were grave. 
The mere fact that I had no young companions, 
no story books, no outdoor amusements, none of 
the thousand and one employments provided 
30 



FATHER AND SON 

for other children in more conventional surround- 
ings, did not make me discontented or fretful, 
because I did not know of the existence of such 
entertainments. In exchange, I became keenly 
attentive to the limited circle of interests open to 
me. Oddly enough, I have no recollection of any 
curiosity about other children, nor of any desire 
to speak to them or play with them. They did 
not enter into my dreams, which were occupied 
entirely with grown-up people and animals. I 
had three dolls, to whom my attitude was not very 
intelligible. Two of these were female, one 
with a shapeless face of rags, the other in wax. 
But, in my fifth year, when the Crimean War 
broke out, I was given a third doll, a soldier, 
dressed very smartly in a scarlet cloth tunic. 
I used to put the dolls on three chairs, and 
harangue them aloud, but my sentiment to them 
was never confidential, until our maid-servant 
one day, intruding on my audience, and mis- 
understanding the occasion of it, said: ''What? 
a boy, and playing with a soldier when he's got 
two lady-dolls to play with?" I had never 
thought of my dolls as confidants before, but 
from that time forth I paid a special attention 
to the soldier, in order to make up to him for 
Lizzie's unwarrantable insult. 
The declaration of war with Russia brought 
31 



FATHER AND SON 

the first breath of outside Ufe into our Calvinist 
cloister. My parents took in a daily newspaper, 
which they had never done before, and events 
in picturesque places, which my Father and I 
looked out on the map, were eagerly discussed. 
One of my vividest early memories can be dated 
exactly. I was playing about the house, and 
suddenly bui'st into the breakfast-room, where, 
close to the door, sat an amazing figure, a very 
tall young man, as stiff as my doll, in a gorgeous 
scarlet tunic. Quite far away from him, at her 
writing-table, my Mother sat with her Bible open 
before her, and was urging the gospel plan of 
salvation on his acceptance. She promptly told 
me to run away and play, but I had seen a great 
sight. This guardsman was in the act of leaving 
for the Crimea, and his adventures, — he was con- 
verted in consequence of my Mother's instruction, 
— ^were afterwards told by her in a tract, called 
'The Guardsman of the Alma," of which I 
believe that more than half a million of copies 
were circulated. He was killed in that battle, 
and this added an extraordinary lustre to my 
dream of him. I see him still in my mind's 
eye, large, stiff, and unspeakably briUiant, seated, 
from respect, as near as possible to our parlour 
door. This apparition gave reality to my subse- 
quent conversations with the soldier doll. 
32 



FATHER AND SON 

That same victory of the Alma, which was 
reported in London on my fifth birthday, is 
also marked very clearly in my memory by a 
family circimistance. We were seated at break- 
fast, at om- small romid table drawn close up to 
the window, my Father with his back to the 
light. Suddenly, he gave a sort of cry, and 
read out the opening sentences from the Times 
announcing a battle in the valley of the Alma. 
No doubt the strain of national anxiety had 
been very great, for both he and my Mother 
seemed deeply excited. He broke off his read- 
ing when the fact of the decisive victory was 
assured, and he and my Mother sank simultane- 
ously on their knees in front of their tea 
and bread-and-butter, while in a loud voice my 
Father gave thanks to the God of Battles. This 
patriotism was the more remarkable, in that he 
had schooled himself, as he beheved, to put his 
''heavenly citizenship" above all earthly duties. 
To those who said: '' Because you are a Christian, 
surely you are not less an Enghshman?" he 
would reply by shaking his head, and by saying: 
"I am a citizen of no earthly State." He did 
not reaUse that, in reality, and, to use a cant 
phrase not yet coined in 1854, there existed in 
Great Britain no more thorough Jingo than he. 

Another instance of the remarkable way in 
33 



FATHER AND SON 

which the interests of daily hfe were mingled, 
in our strange household, with the practice of 
religion, made an impression upon my memory. 
We had all three been much excited by a report 
that a certain dark geometer-moth, generated 
in underground stables, had been met with in 
Ishngton. Its name, I think, is boletobia fuligi- 
naria, and I believe that it is excessively rare in 
England. We were sitting at family prayers, 
on a summer morning, I think in 1855, when 
through the open window a brown moth came 
sailing. My Mother immediately interrupted the 
reading of the Bible by saying to my Father, 
''0! Henry, do you think that can be boletobia?'* 
My Father rose up from the sacred book, exam- 
ined the insect, which had now perched, and 
replied: ''No! it is only the common Vapourer, 
orgygia antiqua,'' resuming his seat, and the 
exposition of the Word, without any apology or 
embarrassment. 

In the com'se of this, my sixth year, there 
happened a series of minute and soundless 
incidents which, elementary as they may seem 
when told, were second in real importance to 
none in my mental history. The recollection 
of them confirms me in the opinion that certain 
leading features in each human soul are inherent 
to it, and cannot be accounted for by suggestion 
34 



FATHER AND SON 

or training. In my own case, I was most care- 
fully withdrawn; like Princess Blanchefleur in 
her marble fortress, from every outside influence 
whatever, yet to me the instinctive life came as 
unexpectedly as her lover came to her in the 
basket of roses. What came to me was the 
consciousness of self, as a force and as a com- 
panion, and it came as the result of one or two 
shocks, which I will relate. 

In consequence of hearing so much about 
an Omniscient God, a being of supernatural 
wisdom and penetration who was always with us, 
who made, in fact, a fourth in our company, I 
had come to think of Him, not without awe, 
but with absolute confidence. My Father and 
Mother, in their serene discipline of me, never 
argued with one another, never even differed; 
their wills seemed absolutely one. My Mother 
always deferred to my Father, and in his absence 
spoke of him to me, as if he were all- wise. I 
confused him in some sense with God; at all 
events I believed that my Father knew every- 
thing and saw everything. One morning in my 
sixth year, my Mother and I were alone in the 
morning-room, when my Father came in and 
announced some fact to us. I was standing 
on the rug, gazing at him, and when he made 
this statement, I remember turning quickly, 
35 



FATHER AND SON 

in embarrassment, and looking into the fire. 
The shock to me was as that of a thimderbolt, 
for what my Father had said was not true. My 
Mother and I, who had been present at the trifling 
incident, were aware that it had not happened 
exactly as it had been reported to him. My 
Mother gently told him so, and he accepted the 
correction. Nothing could possibly have been 
more trifling to my parents, but to me it meant 
an epoch. Here was the appalling discovery, 
never suspected before, that my Father was 
not as God, and did not know everything. The 
shock was not caused by any suspicion that he 
was not telling the truth, as it appeared to him, 
but by the awful proof that he was not, as I had 
supposed, omniscient. 

This experience was followed by another, 
which confirmed the first, but carried me a great 
deal further. In our little back-garden, my 
Father had built up a rockery for ferns and 
mosses, and from the water-supply of the house 
he had drawn a leaden pipe so that it pierced 
upwards through the rockery and produced, 
when a tap was turned, a pretty silvery parasol 
of water. The pipe was exposed somewhere 
near the foot of the rockery. One day, two 
workmen, who were doing some repairs, left their 
tools during the dinner-hour in the back-garden, 
36 



FATHER AND SON 

and as I was marching about I suddenly thought 
that to see whether one of these tools could make 
a hole in the pipe would be attractive. It did 
make such a hole, quite easily, and then the 
matter escaped my mind. But a day or two 
afterwards, when my Father came in to dinner, 
he was very angry. He had turned the tap, and, 
instead of the fountain arching at the sunmiit, 
there had been a rush of water through a hole 
at the foot. The rockery was absolutely ruined. 

Of course I reahsed in a moment what I had 
done, and I sat frozen with alarm, waiting to 
be denounced. But my Mother remarked on 
the visit of the plumbers two or three days 
before, and my Father instantly took up the 
suggestion. No doubt that was it; the mis- 
chievous fellows had thought it amusing to stab 
the pipe and spoil the fountain. No suspicion 
fell on me; no question was asked of me. I 
sat there, turned to stone within, but outwardly 
sympathetic and with unchecked appetite. 

We attribute, I believe, too many moral 
ideas to little children. It is obvious that in 
this tremendous juncture, I ought to have been 
urged forward by good instincts, or held back 
by naughty ones. But I am sure that the fear 
which I experienced for a short time, and which so 
imexpectedly melted away, was a purely physi- 
37 



FATHER AND SON 

cal one. It had nothing to do with the emo- 
tions of a contrite heart. As to the destruction of 
the fountain, I was sorry about that, for my own 
sake, since I admired the skipping water extremely, 
and had no idea that I was spoihng its display. 
But the emotions which now thronged within me, 
and which led me with an almost unwise alacrity, 
to seek solitude in the back-garden, were not 
moral at all, they were intellectual. I was not 
ashamed of having successfully — and so surpris- 
ingly — deceived my parents by my crafty silence; 
I looked upon that as a providential escape, and 
dismissed all further thought of it. I had other 
things to think of. 

In the first place, the theory that my Father 
was omniscient or infallible was now dead and 
buried. He probably knew very Httle; in this 
case he had not known a fact of such importance 
that if you did not know that, it could hardly 
matter what you knew. My Father, as a deity, 
as a natural force of immense prestige, fell in my 
eyes to a human level. In future, his statements 
about things in general need not be accepted 
implicitly. But of all the thoughts which rushed 
upon my savage and undeveloped little brain at 
this crisis, the most curious was that I had found 
a companion and a confidant in myself. There 
was a secret in this world and it belonged to me 
38 



FATHER AND SON 

and to a somebody who lived in the same body 
with me. There were two of us, and we could 
talk with one another. It is difficult to define 
impressions so rudimentary, but it is certain that 
it was in this dual form that the sense of my 
individuaUty now suddenly descended upon me, 
and it is equally certain that it was a great 
solace to me to find a sympathiser in my own 
breast. 

About this time, my Mother, carried away 
by the current of her literary and her philan- 
thropic work, left me more and more to my 
own devices. She was seized with a great en- 
thusiasm; as one of her admirers and disciples 
has written, ''she went on her way, sowing 
beside all waters." I would not for a moment 
let it be supposed that I regard her as a Mrs. 
Jellyby, or that I think she neglected me. But 
a remarkable work had opened up before her; 
after her long years in a mental hermitage, she 
was drawn forth into the clamorous harvest-field 
of souls. She developed an unexpected gift of 
persuasion over strangers whom she met in the 
omnibus or in the train, and with whom she 
courageously grappled ; this began by her noting, 
with deep humility and joy, that ''I have reason 
to judge the sound conversion to God of three 
young persons within a few weeks, by the in- 



FATHER AND SON 

strumentality of my conversations with them." 
At the same time, as another of her biographers lias 
said, ''those testimonies to the Blood of Christ, 
the fruits of her pen, began to be spread very 
widely, even to the most distant parts of the 
globe." My Father, too, was at this time at 
the height of his activity. After breakfast, each 
of them was amply occupied, perhaps until night- 
fall; our evenings we still always spent together. 
Sometimes my Mother took me with her on her 
"unknown day's employ"; I recollect pleasant 
rambles through the City by her side, and the 
act of looking up at her figure soaring above me. 
But when all was done, I had hours and hours of 
complete soHtude, in my Father's study, in the 
back-garden, above all in the garret. 

The garret was a fairy place. It was a low 
lean-to, lighted from the roof. It was wholly 
unfurnished, except for two objects, an ancient 
hat-box and a still more ancient skin-trunk. 
The hat-box puzzled me extremely, till one 
day, asking my Father what it was, I got a dis- 
tracted answer which led me to beheve that it 
was itself a sort of hat, and I made a laborious 
but repeated effort to wear it. The skin-trunk 
was absolutely empty, but the inside of the hd 
of it was lined with sheets of what I now know 
to have been a sensational novel. It was, of 
40 



FATHER AND SON 

course, a fragment, but I read it, kneeling on the 
bare floor, with indescribable rapture. It will be 
recollected that the idea of fiction, of a dehberately 
invented story, had been kept from me with 
entire success. I therefore implicitly believed 
the tale in the lid of the trunk to be a true ac- 
count of the sorrows of a lady of title, who had 
to flee the country, and who was pursued into 
foreign lands by enemies bent upon her ruin. 
Somebody had an interview with a '^ minion" 
in a ''mask"; I went downstairs and looked 
up these words in Bailey's ''English Dictionary," 
but was left in darkness as to what they had to 
do with the lady of title. This ridiculous frag- 
ment filled me with delicious fears ; I fancied that 
my Mother, who was out^o much, might be threat- 
ened by dangers of the same sort; and the fact 
that the narrative came abruptly to an end, in the 
middle of one of its most thrilling sentences, 
wound me up almost to a disorder of wonder and 
romance. 

The preoccupation of my parents threw me 
more and more upon my own resources. But 
what are the resources of a solitary child of 
six? I was never inclined to make friends with 
servants, nor did our successive maids proffer, 
so far as I recollect, any advances. Perhaps, 
with my "dedication" and my grown-up ways 
41 



FATHER AND SON 

of talking, I did not seem to them at all an at- 
tractive little boy. I continued to have no 
companions, or even acquaintances of my own 
age. I am unable to recollect exchanging two 
words with another child till after my Mother's 
death. The abundant energy which my Mother 
now threw into her public work did not affect 
the quietude of our private life. We had some 
visitors in the day-time, people who came to 
consult one parent or the other. But they never 
stayed to a meal, and we never returned their 
visits. I do not quite know how it was that 
neither of my parents took me to any of the 
sights of London, although I am sure it was a 
question of principle with them. Notwithstand- 
ing all our study of natural history, I was never 
introduced to live wild beasts at the Zoo, nor to 
dead ones at the British Museum. I can under- 
stand better why we never visited a picture- 
gallery or a concert-room. So far as I can recol- 
lect, the only time I was ever taken to any place 
of entertainment was when my Father and I paid 
a visit, long anticipated, to the Great Globe 
in Leicester Square. This was a huge struct- 
ure, the interior of which one ascended by 
means of a spiral staircase. It was a poor affair; 
that was concave in it which should have been 
convex, and my imagination was deeply affronted. 
42 



FATHER AND SON 

I could invent a far better Great Globe than that 
in my mind's eye ,in the garret. 

Being so restricted, then, and yet so active, 
my mind took refuge in an infantile species of 
natural magic. This contended with the definite 
ideas of religion which my parents were continu- 
ing, with too mechanical a persistency, to force 
into my nature, and it ran parallel with them. 
I formed strange superstitions, which I can only 
render inteUigible by naming some concrete ex- 
amples. I persuaded myself that, if I could 
only discover the proper words to say or the 
proper passes to make, I could induce the gor- 
geous birds and butterflies in my Father's illus- 
trated manuals to come to hfe, and fly out of the 
book, leaving holes behind them. I believed 
that, when, at the Chapel, we sang, drearily and 
slowly, loud hymns of experience and humilia- 
tion, I could boom forth with a sound equal to 
that of dozens of singers, if I could only hit upon 
the formula. During morning and evening prayers, 
which were extremely lengthy and fatiguing, I 
fancied that one of my two selves could fht up, 
and sit clinging to the cornice, and look down 
on my other self and the rest of us, if I could only 
find the key. I laboured for hours in search of 
these formulas, thinking to compass my ends by 
means absolutely irrational. For example, I was 
43 



FATHER AND SON 

convinced that if I could only count consecutive 
numbers long enough, without losing one, I 
should suddenly, on reaching some far-distant 
figure, find myself in possession of the great 
secret. I feel quite sure that nothing external 
suggested these ideas of magic, and I think it 
probable that they approached the ideas of 
savages at a very early stage of development. 

All this ferment of mind was entirely unob- 
served by my parents. But when I formed the 
belief that it was necessary, for the success of my 
practical magic, that I should hurt myself, and 
when, as a matter of fact, I began, in extreme 
secrecy, to run pins into my flesh and bang my 
joints with books, no one will be surprised to 
hear that my Mother's attention was drawn to 
the fact that I was looking ''delicate." The 
notice nowadays universally given to the hygienic 
rules of life was rare fifty years ago, and among 
deeply rehgious people, in particular, fatahstic 
views of disease prevailed. If any one was ill, 
it showed that ''the Lord's hand was extended 
in chastisement," and much prayer was poured 
forth in order that it might be explained to 
the sufferer, or to his relations, in what he or 
they had sinned. People would, for instance, 
go on living over a cess-pool, working them- 
selves up into an agony to discover how they had 
44 



FATHER AND SON 

incurred the displeasure of the Lord, but never 
moving away. As I became very pale and 
nervous, and slept badly at nights, with visions 
and loud screams in my sleep, I was taken to a 
physician, who stripped me and tapped me all 
over (this gave me some valuable hints for my 
magical practices), but could find nothing the 
matter. He recommended, — whatever physicians 
in such cases always recommend, — but nothing 
was done. If I was feeble it was the Lord's 
Will, and we must acquiesce. 

It culminated in a sort of fit of hysterics, when 
I lost all self-control, and sobbed with tears, 
and banged my head on the table. While this 
was proceeding, I was conscious of that dual 
individuality of which I have already spoken, 
since while one part of me gave way, and could 
not resist, the other part in some extraordinary 
sense seemed standing aloof, much impressed. 
I was alone with my Father when this crisis sud- 
denly occurred, and I was interested to see that 
he was greatly alarmed. It was a very long time 
since we had spent a day out of London, and I 
said, on being coaxed back to calmness, that I 
wanted ''to go into the country." Like the dying 
Falstaff, I babbled of green fields. My Father, 
after a httle reflection, proposed to take me to 
Primrose Hill. I had never heard of the place, 
45 



FATHER AND SON 

and names have always appealed directly to 
my imagination. I was in the highest degree 
delighted, and could hardly restrain my im- 
patience. As soon as possible we set forth west- 
ward, my hand in my Father's, with the hveliest 
anticipations. I expected to see a momitain 
absolutely carpeted with pr^mi'oses, a terrestrial 
galaxy like that which covered the hill that led 
up to Montgomery Castle in Donne's poem. 
But at length, as we walked from the Chalk 
Farm direction, a miserable acclivity stole into 
view — surrounded, even in those days, on most 
sides by houses, with its grass worn to the buff 
by millions of boots, and resembling what I 
meant by 'Hhe country" about as much as 
Poplar resembles Paradise. We sat down on a 
bench at its inglorious summit, whereupon I 
burst into tears, and in a heart-rending whisper 
sobbed, ''Oh! Papa, let us go home!" 

This was the lachrymose epoch in a career not 
otherwise given to weeping, for I must tell one 
more tale of tears. About this time, — the autumn 
of 1855, — my parents were disturbed more than 
once in the twilight, after I had been put to bed, 
by shrieks from my crib. They would rush up 
to my side, and find me in great distress, but would 
be unable to discover the cause of it. The fact 
was that I was half beside myself with ghostly 
46 



FATHER AND SON 

fears, increased and pointed by the fact that there 
had been some daring burglaries in our street. 
Our servant-maid, who slept at the top of the 
house, had seen, or thought she saw, upon a 
moonlight night, the figure of a crouching man, 
silhouetted against the sky, slip down from the 
roof and leap into her room. She screamed, 
and he fled away. Moreover, as if this were not 
enough for my tender nerves, there had been 
committed a horrid murder, at a baker's shop 
just round the comer in the Caledonian Road, 
to which murder actuality was given to us by 
the fact that my Mother had been "just thinking" 
of getting her bread from this shop. Children, 
I think, were not spared the details of these 
affairs fifty years ago; at least, I was not, and 
my nerves were a packet of spilikins. 

But what made me scream o' nights, was 
that when my Mother had tucked me up in bed, 
and had heard me say my prayer, and had 
prayed aloud on her knees at my side, and had 
stolen downstairs, noises immediately began in 
the room. There was a rusthng of clothes, and 
a slapping of hands, and a gurgling, and a sniffing, 
and a trotting. These horrible muffled sounds 
would go on, and die away, and be resumed; 
I would pray very fervently to God to save me 
from my enemies; and sometimes I would go to 
47 



FATHER AND SON 

sleep. But on other occasions, my faith and forti- 
tude aUke gave way, and I screamed ''Mamma! 
Mamma!" Then would my parents come boimd- 
ing up the stairs, and comfort me, and kiss me, 
and assure me it was nothing. And nothing it 
was while they were there, but no sooner had 
they gone than the ghostly riot reconmienced. 
It was at last discovered by my Mother that 
the whole mischief was due to a card of framed 
texts, fastened by one nail to the wall; this did 
nothing when the bed-room door was shut, but 
when it was left open (in order that my parents 
might hear me call), the card began to gallop in 
the draught, and made the most intolerable 
noises. 

Several things tended at this time to alienate 
my conscience from the hne which my Father 
had so rigidly traced for it. The question of the 
efficacy of prayer, which has puzzled wiser heads 
than mine was, began to trouble me. It was 
insisted on in our household that if anything 
was desired, you should not, as my Mother said, 
''lose any time in seeking for it, but ask God to 
guide you to it." In many junctures of fife, this 
is precisely what, in sober fact, they did. I 
will not dwell here on their theories, which my 
Mother put forth, with unflinching directness, 
in her pubUshed writings. But I found that a 
48 



FATHER AND SON 

difference was made between my privileges in 
this matter and. theirs, and this led to many 
discussions. My parents said: ''Whatever you 
need, tell Him and He will grant it, if it is His 
will." Very well; I had need of a large painted 
humming-top which I had seen in a shop-window 
in the Caledonian Road. Accordingly, I intro- 
duced a supplication for this object into my 
evening prayer, carefully adding the words: 
"If it is Thy will." This, I recollect, placed my 
Mother in a dilemma, and she consulted my 
Father. Taken, I suppose, at a disadvantage, 
my Father told me I must not pray for ''things 
like that." To which I answered by another 
query, "Why?" And I added that he said we 
ought to pray for things we needed, and that 
I needed the humming-top a great deal more 
than I did the conversion of the heathen or the 
restitution of Jerusalem to the Jews, two objects 
of my nightly suppHcation which left me very 
cold. 

I have reason to believe, looking back upon 
this scene, conducted by candle-Hght in the 
front parlour, that my Mother was much baffled 
by the logic of my argument. She had gone so 
far as to say publicly that no "things or circum- 
stances are too insignificant to bring before the 
God of the whole earth." I persisted that this 
49 



FATHER AND SON 

covered the case of the humming-top, which was 
extremely significant to me. I noticed that she 
held aloof from the discussion, which was carried 
on with some show of annoyance by my Father. 
He had never gone quite so far as she did in 
regard to this question of praying for material 
things. I am not sure that she was convinced 
that I ought to have been checked; but he could 
not help seeing that it reduced their favourite 
theory to an absurdity for a small child to exer- 
cise the privilege. He ceased to argue, and 
told me peremptorily that it was not right for 
me to pray for things like humming-tops, and 
that I must do it no more. His authority, of 
course, was paramount, and I yielded; but my 
faith in the efficacy of prayer was a good deal 
shaken. The fatal suspicion had crossed my 
mind that the reason why I was not to pray for 
the top was because it was too expensive for my 
parents to buy, that being the usual excuse for 
not getting things I wished for. 

It was about the date of my sixth birthday 
that I did something very naughty, some act of 
direct disobedience, for which my Father, after 
a solemn sermon, chastised me, sacrificially, by 
giving me several cuts with a cane. This action 
was justified, as everything he did was justified, 
by reference to Scripture — ''Spare the rod and 
50 



FATHER AND SON 

spoil the child." I suppose that there are some 
children, of a sullen and lymphatic temperament, 
who are smartened up and made more wide-awake 
by a whipping. It is largely a matter of con- 
vention, the exercise being endured (I am told) 
with pride by the infants of our aristocracy, but 
not tolerated by the lower classes. I am afraid 
that I proved my inherent vulgarity by being 
made, not contrite or humble, but furiously 
angry by this caning. I cannot account for the 
flame of rage which it awakened in my bosom. 
My dear, excellent Father had beaten me, not 
very severely, without ill-temper, and with the 
most genuine desire to improve me. But he 
was not well-advised, especially so far as the 
''dedication to the Lord's service" was concerned. 
This same ''dedication" had ministered to my 
vanity, and there are some natures which are not 
improved by being humiliated. I have to confess 
with shame that I went about the house for some 
days with a murderous hatred of my Father 
locked within my bosom. He did not suspect 
that the chastisement had not been wholly effica- 
cious, and he bore me no malice; so that after 
a while, I forgot and thus forgave him. But 
I do not regard physical punishment as a wise 
element in the education of proud and sensitive 
children. 

51 



FATHER AND SON 

My theological misdeeds culminated, however, 
in an act so puerile and preposterous that I 
should not venture to record it if it did not throw 
some glimmering of light on the subject which 
I have proposed to myself in writing these pages. 
My mind continued to dwell on the mysterious 
question of prayer. It puzzled me greatly to 
know why, if we were God's children, and if he 
was watching over us by night and day, we might 
not supplicate for toys and sweets and smart 
clothes as well as for the conversion of the heathen. 
Just at this juncture, we had a special service 
at the Room, at which our attention was par- 
ticularly called to what we always spoke of as 
"the field of missionary labour." The East 
was represented among "the saints" by an excel- 
lent Irish peer, who had, in his early youth, 
converted and married a lady of colour; this 
Asiatic shared in our Sunday morning meetings, 
and was an object of helpless terror to me; I 
shrank from her amiable caresses, and vaguely 
identified her with a personage much spoken of 
in our family circle, the "Personal Devil." 

All these matters drew my thoughts to the 
subject of idolatry, which was severely censured 
at the missionary meeting. I cross-examined 
my Father very closely as to the nature of this 
sin, and pinned him down to the categorical 
52 



FATHER AND SON 

statement that idolatry consisted in praying to 
any one or anything but God himself. Wood 
and stone, in the words of the hymn, were pecu- 
liarly liable to be bowed down to by the heathen 
in their bhndness. I pressed my Father further 
on this subject, and he assured me that God would 
be very angry, and would signify His anger, if 
any one, in a Christian country, bowed down to 
wood and stone. I cannot recall why I was so 
pertinacious on this subject, but I remember 
that my Father became a httle restive under my 
cross-examination. I determined, however, to 
test the matter for myself, and one morning, when 
both my parents were safely out of the house, 
I prepared for the great act of heresy. I was 
in the morning-room on the ground-floor, where, 
with much labour, I hoisted a small chair on to the 
table close to the window. My heart was now 
beating as if it would leap out of my side, but I 
pursued my experiment. I knelt down on the 
carpet in front of the table, and looking up I said 
my daily prayer in a loud voice, only substituting 
the address ''0 Chair!" for the habitual one. 

Having carried this act of idolatry safely 
through, I waited to see what would happen. 
It was a fine day, and I gazed up at the shp of 
white sky above the houses opposite, and ex- 
pected something to appear in it. God would 
53 



FATHER AND SON 

certainly exhibit his anger in some terrible form, 
and would chastise my impious and wilful action. 
I was very much alarmed, but still more excited; 
I breathed the high, sharp air of defiance. But 
nothing happened; there was not a cloud in the 
sky, not an unusual sound in the street. Presently 
I was quite sure that nothing would happen. I 
had committed idolatry, flagrantly and deliber- 
ately, and God did not care. The result of this 
ridiculous act was not to make me question the 
existence and power of God; those were forces 
which I did not dream of ignoring. But what 
it did was to lessen still further my confidence in 
my Father's knowledge of the Divine mind. 
My Father had said, positively, that if I wor- 
shipped a thing made of wood, God would mani- 
fest his anger. I had then worshipped a chair, 
made (or partly made) of wood, and God had 
made no sign whatever. My Father, therefore, 
was not really acquainted with the Divine practice 
in cases of idolatry. And with that, dismissing 
the subject, I dived again into the implumbed 
depths of the 'Tenny Cyclopsedia." 



54 



CHAPTER III 

That I might die in my early childhood was a 
thought which frequently recurred to the mind 
of my Mother. She endeavoured, with a Roman 
fortitude, to face it without apprehension. Soon 
after I had completed my fifth year she had writ- 
ten as follows in her secret journal: 

^'Should we be called on to weep over the 
early grave of the dear one whom now we are 
endeavouring to train for heaven, may we be 
able to remember that we never ceased to pray 
for and watch over him. It is easy, compara- 
tively, to watch over an infant. Yet shall I 
be sufficient for these things? I am not. But 
God is sufficient. In his strength I have begun 
the warfare, in his strength I will persevere, and 
I will faint not till either I myself or my httle 
one is beyond the reach of earthly solicitude." 

That either she or I would be called away 
from earth, and that our physical separation was 
55 



FATHER AND SON 

at hand, seems to have been always vaguely 
present in my Mother's dreams, as an obstinate 
conviction to be carefully recognised and jealously 
guarded against. 

It was not, however, until the course of my 
seventh year, that the tragedy occurred, which 
altered the whole course of our family existence. 
My Mother had hitherto seemed strong and in 
good health ; she had even made the remark to my 
Father, that ''sorrow and pain, the badges of Chris- 
tian discipleship," appeared to be withheld from 
her. On her birthday, which was to be her last, she 
had written these ejaculations in her locked diary: 

"Lord, forgive the sins of the past, and help 
me to be faithful in future! May this be a year 
of much blessing, a year of jubilee! May I be 
kept lowly, trusting, loving! May I have more 
blessing than in all former years combined! 
May I be happier as a wife, mother, sister, writer, 
mistress, friend!" 

But a symptom began to alarm her and in 
the beginning of May, having consulted a local 
physician without being satisfied, she went to 
see a specialist in a northern suburb, in whose 
judgment she had great confidence. This oc- 
casion I recollect with extreme vividness. I had 
56 



FATHER AND SON 

been put to bed by my Father, in itself a note- 
worthy event. My crib stood near a window 
overlooking the street; my parents' ancient four- 
poster, a relic of the eighteenth century, hid me 
from the door, but I could see the rest of the 
room. After falling asleep on this particular 
evening, I awoke silently, surprised to see two 
Ughted candles on the table, and my Father seated 
writing by them. I also saw a httle meal ar- 
ranged. 

While I was wondering at all this, the door 
opened, and my Mother entered the room; she 
emerged from behind the bed-curtains, with 
her bonnet on, having returned from her ex- 
pedition. My Father rose hurriedly, pushing 
back his chair, and greeted her by exclaiming: 
"Well, what does he say?" There was a pause, 
while my Mother seemed to be steadying her voice, 
and then she rephed, loudly and distinctly, "He 
says it is — " and she mentioned one of the most 
cruel maladies by which our poor mortal nature 
can be tormented. Then I saw them fold one 
another in a silent long embrace, and presently 
sink together out of sight on their knees, at the 
further side of the bed, whereupon my Father 
lifted up his voice in prayer. Neither of them 
had noticed me, and now I lay back on my pillow 
and fell asleep. 

57 



FATHER AND SON 

Next morning, when we three sat at break- 
fast, my mind reverted to the scene of the previous 
night. With my eyes on my plate, as I was 
cutting up my food, I asked, casually, ''What is 
— ?" mentioning the disease whose unfamiliar 
name I had heard from my bed. Receiving no 
reply, I looked up to discover why my question 
was not answered, and I saw my parents gazing 
at each other with lamentable eyes. In some 
way, I know not how, I was conscious of the 
presence of an incommunicable mystery, and I 
kept silence, though tortured with curiosity, nor 
did I ever repeat my inquiry. 

About a fortnight later, my Mother began 
to go three times a week all the long way from 
Islington to Pimlico, in order to visit a certain 
practitioner, who undertook to apply a special 
treatment to her case. This involved great 
fatigue and distress to her, but so far as I was 
personally concerned it did me a great deal of 
good. I invariably accompanied her, and when 
she was very tired and weak, I enjoyed the 
pride of believing that I protected her. The 
movement, the exercise, the occupation, lifted 
my morbid fears and superstitions like a cloud. 
The medical treatment to which my poor Mother 
was subjected was very painful, and she had a 
pecuhar sensitiveness to pain. She carried on 
58 



FATHER AND SON 

her evangelical work as long as she possibly 
could, continuing to converse with her fellow 
passengers on spiritual matters. It was wonder- 
ful that a woman, so reserved and proud as 
she by nature was, could conquer so completely her 
natural timidity. In those last months, she 
scarcely ever got into a railway carriage or into 
an omnibus, without presently offering tracts to 
the persons sitting within reach of her, or en- 
deavouring to begin a conversation with some 
one on the sufficiency of the Blood of Jesus to 
cleanse the human heart from sin. Her manners 
were so gentle and persuasive, she looked so inno- 
cent, her small, sparkhng features were hghted 
up with so much benevolence, that I do not think 
she ever met with discourtesy or roughness. 
Imitative imp that I was, I sometimes took part 
in these strange conversations, and was mightily 
puffed up by comphments paid, in whispers, to 
my infant piety. But my Mother very properly 
discouraged this, as tending in me to spiritual 
pride 

If my parents, in their desire to separate them- 
selves from the world, had regretted that through 
their happiness they seemed to have forfeited 
the Christian privilege of affliction, they could not 
continue to complain of any absence of temporal 
adversity. Everything seemed to combine, in 



FATHER AND SON 

the course of this fatal year 1856, to harass and 
alarm them. Just at a moment when illness 
created a special drain upon their resources, 
their slender income, instead of being increased, 
was seriously diminished. There is little sym- 
pathy felt in this world of rhetoric for the silent 
sufferings of the genteel poor, yet there is no class 
that deserves a more charitable commiseration.. 
At the best of times, the money which my parents 
had to spend was an exiguous and an inelastic 
sum. Strictly economical, proud — in an old- 
fashioned mode now quite out of fashion — to con- 
ceal the fact of their poverty, painfully scrupulous 
to avoid giving inconvenience to shop-people, 
tradesmen or servants, their whole financial 
career had to be carried on with the adroitness 
of a campaign through a hostile country. But 
now, at the moment when fresh pressing claims 
were made on their resources, my Mother's 
small capital suddenly disappeared. It had been 
placed, on bad advice (they were as children in 
such matters), in a Cornish mine, the grotesque 
name of which. Wheal Maria, became familiar to 
my ears. One day the river Tamar, in a playful 
mood, broke into Wheal Maria, and not a penny 
more was ever lifted from that unfortunate enter- 
prise. About the same time, a small annuity which 
my Mother had inherited also ceased to be paid. 



FATHER AND SON 

On my Father's books and lectures, therefore, 
the whole weight now rested, and that at a 
moment when he was depressed and unnerved 
by anxiety. It was contrary to his principles 
to borrow money, so that it became necessary to 
pay doctor's and chemist's bills pimctually, and 
yet carry on the httle household with the very 
small margin. Each artifice of economy was 
now exercised to enable this to be done without 
falling into debt, and every branch of expenditure 
was cut down; clothes, books, the little garden 
which was my Father's pride, all felt the pressure 
of new poverty. Even our food, which had always 
been simple, now became Spartan indeed, and I 
am sure that my Mother often pretended to have 
no appetite that there might remain enough to 
satisfy my hunger. Fortimately my Father was 
able to take us away in the autumn for six weeks 
by the sea in Wales, the expenses of this tour 
being paid for by a professional engagement, 
so that my seventh birthday was spent in an 
ecstasy of happiness, on golden sands, under 
a brilliant sky, and in sight of the glorious azure 
ocean beating in from an infinitude of melting 
horizons. Here, too, my Mother, perched in a 
nook of the high rocks, surveyed the west, and 
forgot for a little while her weakness and the 
gnawing, grinding pain. 
61 



FATHER AND SON 

But in October, our sorrows seemed to close 
in upon us. We went back to London, and for 
the first time in their married hfe, my parents 
were divided. My Mother was now so seriously 
weaker that the omnibus- journeys to Pimlico be- 
came impossible. My father could not leave his 
work, and so my mother and I had to take a 
gloomy lodging close to the doctor's house. The 
experiences upon which I presently entered were 
of a nature in which childhood rarely takes a part. 
I was now my Mother's sole and ceaseless com- 
panion; the silent witness of her suffering, of her 
patience, of her vain and delusive attempts to 
obtain alleviation of her anguish. For nearly 
three months I breathed the atmosphere of pain, 
saw no other sight, heard no other sounds, thought 
no other thoughts, than those which accompany 
physical suffering and weariness. To my mem- 
ory these weeks seem years; I have no measure 
of their monotony. The lodgings were bare and 
yet tawdry; out of dingy windows we looked 
from a second storey upon a dull small street, 
drowned in autmnnal fog. My Father came to 
see us when he could, but otherwise, save when 
we made our morning expedition to the doctor, 
or when a slatternly girl waited upon us with our 
distasteful meals, we were alone, — without any 
other occupation than to look forward to that 
62 



FATHER AND SON 

occasional abatement of suffering which was what 
we hoped for most. 

It is difficult for me to recollect how these in- 
terminable hours were spent. But I read aloud 
in a great part of them. I have now in my 
mind's cabinet a picture of my chair turned 
towards the window, partly that I might see the 
book more distinctly, partly not to see quite so 
distinctly that dear patient figure rocking on her 
sofa, or leaning, like a funereal statue, like a muse 
upon a monument, with her head on her arms 
against the mantelpiece. I read the Bible every 
day, and at much length; also, — ^with I cannot 
but think some praiseworthy patience, — a book 
of incommunicable dreariness, called Newton's 
''Thoughts on the Apocalypse." Newton bore a 
great resemblance to my old aversion, Jukes, and I 
made a sort of playful compact with my Mother 
that if I read aloud a certain number of pages out 
of "Thoughts on the Apocalypse," as a reward I 
should be allowed to recite ''my own favourite 
hymns." Among these there was one which united 
her suffrages with mine. Both of us extremely 
admired the piece by Toplady which begins: — 

What though my frail eyelids refuse 

Continual watchings to keep, 
And, punctual as midnight renews, 

Demand the refreshment of sleep. 
63 



FATHER AND SON 

To this day I cannot repeat this hymn without 
a sense of poignant emotion, nor can I pretend 
to decide how much of this is due to its merit 
and how much to the pecuhar nature of the mem- 
ories it recalls. But it might be as rude as I 
genuinely think it to be skilful, and I should con- 
tinue to regard it as a sacred poem. Among all 
my childish memories none is clearer than my 
looking up, after reading, in my high treble, 

Kind Author and Ground of my hope, 

Thee, thee for my God I avow; 
My glad Ebenezer set up, 

And own Thou hast help'd me till now; 

I muse on the years that are past, 
Wherein my defence Thou hast prov'd, 

Nor wilt Thou relinquish at last 
A sinner so signally lov'd, 

and hearing my Mother, her eyes brimming with 
tears and her alabastrine fingers tightly locked 
together, murmur in unconscious repetition: 

Nor wilt Thou relinquish at last 
A sinner so signally lov'd. 

In our lodgings at Pimlico I came across a 
piece of verse which exercised a lasting influence 
on my taste. It was called '^The Cameronian's 
Dream," and it had been written by a certain 
James Hyslop, a schoolmaster on a man-of-war. 
G4 



FATHER AND SON 

I do not know how it came into my possession, 
but I remember it, was adorned by an extremely 
dim and ill-executed wood-cut of a lake surrounded 
by mountains, with tombstones in the foreground. 
This lugubrious frontispiece positively fascinated 
me, and lent a further gloomy charm to the 
ballad itself. It was in this copy of mediocre 
verses that the sense of romance first appealed to 
me, the kind of nature-romance which is con- 
nected with hills, and lakes, and the picturesque 
costumes of old times. The following stanza, 
for instance, brought a revelation to me: 

'Twas a dream of those ages of darkness and blood, 
When the minister's home was the mountain and wood; 
When in Wellwood's dark valley the standard of Zion, 
All bloody and torn, 'mong the heather was lying. 

I persuaded my Mother to explain to me what 
it was all about, and she told me of the affliction 
of the Scottish saints, their flight to the waters 
and the wilderness, their cruel murder while they 
were singing "their last song to the God of Sal- 
vation." I was greatly fired, and the foflowing 
stanza, in particular, reached my ideal of the 
subhme: 

The muskets were flashing, the blue swords were gleaming, 
The helmets were cleft, and the red blood was streaming, 
The heavens grew dark, and the thunder was rolling, 
When in Wellwood's dark muirlands the mighty were falling. 
65 



FATHER AND SON 

Twenty years later I met with the only other 
person whom I have ever encountered who had 
even heard of ''The Cameronian's Dream." This 
was Robert Louis Stevenson, who had been greatly 
struck by it when he was about my age. Prob- 
ably the same ephemeral edition of it reached, at 
the same time, each of our pious households. 

As my Mother's illness progressed, she could 
neither sleep, save by the use of opiates, nor rest, 
except in a sloping postm-e, propped up by many 
pillows. It was my great joy, and a pleasant 
diversion, to be allowed to shift, beat up, and re- 
arrange these pillows, a task which I learned to 
accomplish not too awkwardly. Her sufferings, 
I beheve, were principally caused by the violence 
of the medicaments to which her doctor, who 
was trying a new and fantastic ''cure," thought 
it proper to subject her. jLei; those who take a 
pessimistic view of our social progress ask them- 
selves whether such tortures could to-day be in- 
flicted on a delicate patient, or whether that pa- 
tient would be allowed to exist, in the greatest 
misery, in a lodging with no professional nurse 
to wait upon her, and with no companion but a 
little helpless boy of seven years of age. Time 
passes smoothly and swiftly, and we do not per- 
ceive the mitigations which he brings in his hands. 
Everywhere in the whole system of human hfe, 
66 



FATHER AND SON 

improvements, alleviations, ingenious appliances 
and humane inventions, are being introduced to 
lessen the great burden of suffering. If we were 
suddenly transplanted into the world of only fifty 
years ago, we should be startled and even horror- 
stricken by the wretchedness to which the step 
backwards would re-introduce us. It was in the 
very year of which I am speaking, a year of which 
my personal memories are still vivid, that Sir 
James Simpson received the Monthyon prize as a 
recognition of his discovery of the use of anaes- 
thetics. Can our thoughts embrace the mitiga- 
tion of human torment which the apphcation of 
chloroform alone has caused? My early experi- 
ences, I confess, made me singularly conscious, 
at an age when one should know nothing about 
these things, of that torrent of sorrow and anguish 
and terror which flows under all the footsteps of 
man. Within my childish conscience, already 
some dim inquiry was awake as to the meaning 
of this mystery of pain — 



The floods of the tears meet and gather; 

The sound of them all grows Hke thunder; 
O into what bosom I wonder, 
Is poured the whole sorrow of years ? 
For Eternity only seems keeping 
Account of the great human weeping; 
May God then, the Maker and Father, 
May He find a place for the tears! 
67 



FATHER AND SON 

In my Mother's case, the savage treatment 
did no good; it had to be abandoned, and a day 
or two before Christmas, while the fruits were 
piled in the shop-fronts and the butchers were 
shouting outside their forests of carcases, my 
Father brought us back in a cab through the 
streets to Ishngton, a feeble and languishing com- 
pany. Our invahd bore the journey fairly well, 
enjoying the air, and pointing out to me the 
glittering evidences of the season, but we paid 
heavily for her httle entertainment, since, at her 
earnest wish the window of the cab having been 
kept open, she caught a cold, which became, in- 
deed, the technical cause of a death that no ap- 
plications could now have long delayed. 

Yet she lingered with us six weeks more, and 
during this time I again relapsed, very naturally, 
into sohtude. She now had the care of a prac- 
tised woman, one of the ''saints" from the 
Chapel, and I was only permitted to pay brief 
visits to her bedside. That I might not be kept 
indoors all day and every day, a man, also con- 
nected with the meeting-house, was paid a trifle 
to take me out for a walk each morning. This 
person, who was by turns familiar and truculent, 
was the object of my intense dislike. Our re- 
lations became, in the truest sense, ''forced"; 
I was obliged to walk by his side, but I held that 



FATHER AND SON 

I had no further responsibihty to be agreeable, 
and after a while I ceased to speak to him, or to 
answer his remarks. On one occasion, poor 
dreary man, he met a friend and stopped to chat 
with him. I considered this act to have dissolved 
the bond; I skipped lightly from his side, exam- 
ined several shop-windows which I had been for- 
bidden to look into, made several darts down 
courts and up passages, and, finally, after a de- 
lightful morning, returned home, having known 
my directions perfectly. My official conductor, 
in a shocking condition of fear, was crouching 
by the area-rails looking up and down the street. 
He darted upon me, in a great rage, to know 
''what I meant by it?" I drew myself up as 
tall as I could, hissed ''Bhnd leader of the blind!" 
at him, and with this inappropriate (but very 
effective) Parthian shot, slipped into the house. 
When it was quite certain that no alleviations 
and no medical care could prevent, or even any 
longer postpone, the departure of my Mother, I 
believe that my future conduct became the ob- 
ject of her greatest and her most painful solici- 
tude. She said to my Father that the worst 
trial of her faith came from the feeling that she 
was called upon to leave that child whom she had 
so carefully trained from his earliest infancy for 
the pecuUar service of the Lord, without any 
69 



FATHER AND SON 

knowledge of what his further course would be. 
In many conversations, she most tenderly and 
closely urged my Father, who, however, needed 
no urging, to watch with unceasing care over my 
spiritual welfare. As she grew nearer her end, 
it was observed that she became calmer, and less 
troubled by fears about me. The intensity of her 
prayers and hopes seemed to have a prevailing 
force ; it would have been a sin to doubt that such 
suppUcations, such confidence and devotion, such 
an emphasis of will, should not be rewarded by 
an answer from above in the affirmative. She 
was able, she said, to leave me ''in the hands of 
her loving Lord," or, on another occasion, ''to 
the care of her covenant God." 

Although her faith was so strong and simple, 
my Mother possessed no quaUty of the mystic. 
She never pretended to any visionary gifts, be- 
lieved not at ah in dreams or portents, and en- 
couraged nothing in herself or others which was 
superstitious or fantastic. In order to reahse her 
condition of mind, it is necessary, I think, to ac- 
cept the view that she had formed a definite con- 
ception of the absolute, unmodified and histori- 
cal veracity, in its direct and obvious sense, of 
every statement contained within the covers of 
the Bible. For her, and for my Father, nothing 
was symbolic, nothing allegorical or allusive in 
70 



FATHER AND SON 

any part of Scripture, except what was, in so 
many words, proffered as a parable or a picture. 
Pushing this to its extreme hmit, and allowing 
nothing for the changes of scene or time or race, 
my parents read injunctions to the Corinthian 
converts without any suspicion that what was 
apposite in dealing with half-breed Achaian col- 
onists of the first century might not exactly ap- 
ply to respectable English men and women of 
the nineteenth. They took it, text by text, as 
if no sort of difference existed between the sur- 
roundings of Trimalchion's feast and those of a 
City dinner. Both of my parents, I think, were 
devoid of sympathetic imagination; in my Father, 
I am sure, it was singularly absent. Hence, al- 
though their faith was so strenuous that many 
persons might have called it fanatical, there was 
no mysticism about them. They went rather to 
the opposite extreme, to the cultivation of a 
rigid and iconoclastic hteralness. 

This was curiously exemplified in the very 
hvely interest which they both took in what is 
called 'Hhe interpretation of prophecy," and par- 
ticularly in unwrapping the dark sayings bound 
up in the Book of Revelation. In their impar- 
tial sm-vey of the Bible, they came to this col- 
lection of solemn and splendid visions, sinister 
and obscure, and they had no intention of allow- 
71 



FATHER AND SON 

ing these to be merely stimulating to the fancy, 
or vaguely doctrinal in symbol. When they read 
of seals broken and of vials poured forth, of the 
star which was called Wormwood that fell from 
Heaven, and of men whose hair was as the hair of 
women, and their teeth as the teeth of Uons, they 
did not admit for a moment that these vivid 
mental pictures were of a poetic character, but they 
regarded them as positive statements, in guarded 
language, describing events which were to happen, 
and could be recognised when they did happen. 
It was the explanation, the perfectly prosaic and 
positive explanation, of all these wonders which 
drew them to study the Jukeses and the Newtons 
whose books they so much enjoyed. They were 
helped by these guides to recognise in wild Orien- 
tal visions direct statements regarding Napoleon 
III. and Pope Pius IX. and the King of Pied- 
mont, historic figures which they conceived as 
foreshadowed, in language which admitted of 
plain interpretation, under the names of denizens 
of Babylon and companions of the Wild Beast. 

My Father was in the habit of saying, in later 
years, that no small element in his wedded happi- 
ness was the fact that my Mother and he were of 
one mind in the interpretation of Sacred Prophecy. 
Looking back, it appeal's to me that this unusual 
mental exercise was almost their only relaxation, 
72 



FATHER AND SON 

and that in their economy it took the place which 
is taken, in profaner families, by cards or the 
piano. It was a distraction; it took them com- 
pletely out of themselves. Dm-ing those melan- 
choly weeks at Pimlico, I read aloud another 
work of the same nature as those of Newton and 
Jukes, the ''Horse Apocalypticse " of a Mr. Elliott. 
This was written, I think, in a less disagreeable 
style, and certainly it was less opaquely obscure 
to me. My recollection distinctly is that when 
my Mother could endure nothing else, the argu- 
ments of this book took her thoughts away from 
her pain and hfted her spirits. EUiott saw ''the 
queenly arrogance of Popery" everywhere, and 
believed that the very last days of Babylon the 
Great were come. Lest I say what may be 
thought extravagant, let me quote what my 
Father wrote in his diary at the time of my 
Mother's death. He said that the thought that 
Rome was doomed (as seemed not impossible 
in 1857) so affected my Mother that it "irradi- 
ated her dying hours with an assurance that was 
like the light of the Morning Star, the harbinger 
of the rising sun." 

After our return to Islington, there was a com- 
plete change in my relation to my Mother. At 
Pimhco, I had been all-important, her only com- 
panion, her friend, her confidant. But now that 
73 



FATHER AND SON 

she was at home again, people and things com- 
bined to separate me from her. Now, and for 
the first time in my life, I no longer slept in her 
room, no longer sank to sleep under her kiss, no 
longer saw her mild eyes smile on me with the 
earliest sunshine. Twice a day, after breakfast 
and before I went to rest, I was brought to her 
bedside; but we were never alone, other people, 
sometimes strange people, were there. We had 
no cosy talk ; often she was too weak to do more 
than pat my hand ; her loud and almost constant 
cough terrified and harassed me. I felt, as I 
stood, awkwardly and shyly, by her high bed, 
that I had shrunken into a very small and in- 
significant figure, that she was floating out of 
my reach, that all things, but I knew not what 
nor how, were coming to an end. She herself 
was not herself ; her head that used to be held so 
erect, now rolled or sank upon the pillow; the 
sparkle was all extinguished from those bright, 
dear eyes. I could not understand it; I med- 
itated long, long upon it all in my infantile 
darkness, in the garret, or in the httle slip of a 
cold room where my bed was now placed ; and a 
great, blind anger against I knew not what 
awakened in my soul. 

The two retreats which I have mentioned were 
now all that were left to me. In the back- 
74 



FATHER AND SON 

parlour some one from outside gave me occa- 
sional lessons, of a desultory character. The 
breakfast-room was often haunted by visitors, 
unknown to me by face or name ; ladies, who used 
to pity me and even to pet me, until I became 
nimble in escaping from their caresses. Every- 
thing seemed to be imfixed, uncertain ; it was like 
being on the platform of a railway-station waiting 
for a train. In all this time, the agitated, nervous 
presence of my Father, whose pale face was per- 
manently drawn with anxiety, added to my per- 
turbation, and I became miserable, stupid, as if 
I had lost my way in a cold fog. 

Had I been older and more intelligent, of 
course, it might have been of him and not of 
myself that I should have been thinking. As 
I now look back upon that tragic time, it is for 
him that my heart bleeds, — for them both, so 
singularly fitted as they were to support and cheer 
one another in an existence which their own in- 
nate and cultivated characteristics had made 
little hospitable to other sources of comfort. 
This is not to be dwelt on here. But what must 
be recorded was the extraordinary tranquilhty, 
the serene and sensible resignation, with which 
at length my parents faced the awful hour. Lan- 
guage cannot utter what they suffered, but there 
was no rebeUion, no repinuig; in their case even 
75 



FATHER AND SON 

an atheist might admit that the overpowering 
miracle of grace was mightily efficient. 

It seems almost cruel to the memory of their 
opinions that the only words which rise to my 
mind, the only ones which seem in the least degree 
adequate to describe the attitude of my parents, 
had fallen from the pen of one, whom, in their 
want of imaginative sympathy, they had regard- 
ed as anathema. But John Henry Newman might 
have come from the contemplation of my Mother's 
death-bed, when he wrote: "All the trouble which 
the world inflicts upon us, and which flesh cannot 
but feel, — sorrow, pain, care, bereavement, — 
these avail not to disturb the tranquilHty and the 
intensity with which faith gazes at the Divine 
Majesty." It was "tranquillity," it was not the 
rapture of the mystic. Almost in the last hour 
of her hfe, urged to confess her "joy" in the 
Lord, my Mother, rigidly honest, meticulous in 
self-analysis, as ever, replied: "I have peace, but 
not joy. It would not do to go into eternity with 
a lie in my mouth." 

When the very end approached, and her mind 
was growing clouded, she gathered her strength 
together to say to my Father, "I shall walk 
with Him in white. Won't you take your lamb 
and walk with me?" Confused with sorrow and 
alarm, my Father failed to understand her mean- 
76 



FATHER AND SON 

ing. She became agitated, and she repeated 
two or three times: "Take om* lamb, and walk 
with me!" Then my Father comprehended, and 
pressed me forward; her hand fell softly upon 
mine and she seemed content. Thus was my 
dedication, that had begun in my cradle, sealed 
with the most solemn, the most poignant and 
irresistible insistence, at the death-bed of the 
holiest and purest of women. But what a weight, 
intolerable as the burden of Atlas, to lay on the 
shoulders of a little fragile child! 



77 



CHAPTER IV 

Certainly the preceding year, the seventh of 
my life, had been weighted for us with com- 
prehensive disaster. I have not yet mentioned 
that, at the beginning of my Mother's fatal ilhiess, 
misfortune came upon her brothers. I have never 
known the particulars of their ruin, but, I beheve 
in consequence of A.'s unsuccessful speculations, 
and of the fact that E. had allowed the use of his 
name as a surety, both my uncles were obhged to 
fly from their creditors, and take refuge in Paris. 
This happened just when our need was the sorest, 
and tliis, together with the poignancy of knowing 
that their sister's devoted labours for them had 
been all in vain, added to their unhappiness. 
It was. doubtless also the reason why, having left 
England, they wrote to us no more, carefully 
concealing from us even their address, so that 
when my Mother died, my Father w^as unable to 
communicate with them. I fear that they fell 
into dire distress; before very long we learned 
78 



FATHER AND SON 

that A. had died, but it was fifteen years more 
before we heard anything of E., whose hfe had 
at length been preserved by the kindness of an 
old servant, but whose mind was now so clouded 
that he could recollect httle or nothing of the 
past; and soon he also died. Amiable, gentle, 
without any species of practical abihty, they 
were quite unfitted to struggle with the world, 
which had touched them only to wreck them. 

The flight of my uncles at this particular 
juncture left me without a relative on my Mother's 
side at the time of her death. This isolation 
threw my Father into a sad perplexity. His only 
obvious source of income — but it happened to 
be a remarkably hopeful one — was an engagement 
to deliver a long series of lectures on marine natural 
history throughout the north and centre of Eng- 
land. These lectures were an entire novelty; 
nothing like them had been offered to the pro- 
vincial public before ; and the fact that the newly- 
invented marine aquarium was the fashionable 
toy of the moment added to their attraction. 
My Father was bowed down by sorrow and care, 
but he was not broken. His intellectual forces 
were at their height, and so was his popularity 
as an author. The lectures were to begin in 
March; my Mother was buried on the 13th of 
February. It seemed at first, in the inertia of 
79 



FATHER AND SON 

bereavement, to be all beyond his powers to make 
the supreme effort, but the wholesome prick of 
need urged him on. It was a question of paying 
for food and clothes, of keeping a roof above our 
heads. The captain of a vessel in a storm must 
navigate his ship, although his wife hes dead in 
the cabin. That was my Father's position in 
the spring of 1857; he had to stimulate, instruct, 
amuse large audiences of strangers, and seem 
gay, although affliction and loneliness had settled 
in his heart. He had to do this, or starve. 

But the difficulty still remained. During these 
months what was to become of me? My Father 
could not take me with him from hotel to hotel 
and from lecture-hall to lecture-hall. Nor could 
he leave me, as people leave the domestic cat, in 
an empty house for the neighbours to feed at 
intervals. The dilemma threatened to be insur- 
mountable, when suddenly there descended upon 
us a kind, but Httle-known, paternal cousin from 
the west of England, who had heard of our 
calamities. This lady had a large family of her 
own at Bristol ; she offered to find room in it 
for me so long as ever my Father should be away 
in the north, and when my Father, bewildered 
by so much goodness, hesitated, she came up 
to London and carried me forcibly away in a 
whirlwind of good-nature. Her benevolence was 
80 



FATHER AND SON 

quite spontaneous; and I am not sure that 
she had not added to it ahready by helping to 
nurse our beloved sufferer through part of her 
illness. Of that I am not positive, but I recollect 
very clearly her snatching me from our cold and 
desolate hearthstone, and carrying me off to her 
cheerful house at Chfton. 

Here, for the first time, when half through 
my eighth year, I was thrown into the society 
of yoimg people. My cousins were none of 
them, I believe, any longer children, but they 
were youths and maidens busily engaged in 
various personal interests, all collected in a hive 
of wholesome family energy. Everybody was 
very kind to me, and I sank back, after the 
strain of so many months, into mere childhood 
again. This long visit to my cousins at Clifton 
must have been very delightful: I am dimly 
aware that it was: yet I remember but few of 
its incidents. My memory, so clear and vivid 
about earlier sohtary times, now in all this society 
becomes blurred and vague. I recollect certain 
pleasures; being taken, for instance, to a menag- 
erie, and having a practical joke, in the worst 
taste, played upon me by the pelican. One of 
my cousins, who was a medical student, showed 
me a pistol, and helped me to fire it; he smoked 
a pipe, and I was oddly conscious that both the 
81 



FATHER AND SON 

firearm and the tobacco were definitely hostile 
to my "dedication." My girl-cousins took turns 
in putting me to bed, and on cold nights, or when 
they were in a hurry, allowed me to say my prayer 
under the bed-clothes instead of kneeling at a 
chair. The result of this was further spiritual 
laxity, because I could not help going to sleep 
before the prayer was ended. 

The visit to Clifton was, in fact, a blessed 
interval in my strenuous childhood. It probably 
prevented my nerves from breaking down under 
the pressure of the previous months. The Clifton 
family was God-fearing, in a quiet, sensible way, 
but there was a total absence of all the intensity 
and compulsion of our religious fife at Islington. 
I was not encouraged — I even remember that I 
was gently snubbed — when I rattled forth, parrot- 
fashion, the conventional phraseology of "the 
saints." For a short, enchanting period of 
respite, I hved the life of an ordinary little boy, 
relapsing, to a degree which would have filled my 
Father with despair, into childish thoughts and 
childish language. The result was that of this 
little happy breathing-space I have nothing to 
report. Vague, half-blind remembrances of walks, 
with my tall cousins waving like trees above me, 
pleasant noisy evenings in a great room on the 
ground-floor, faint silver-points of excursions into 
82 



FATHER AND SON 

the country; all this is the very pale and shadowy 
testimony to a brief , interval of healthy, happy, 
child-life, when my hard-driven soul was allowed 
to have, for a httle while, no history. 

The hfe of a child is so brief, its impressions are 
so illusory and fugitive, that it is as difficult to 
record its history as it would be to design a morn- 
ing cloud saihng before the wind. It is short, as 
we count shortness in after years, when the drag 
of lead pulls down to earth the foot that used to 
flutter with a winged impetuosity, and to float 
with the pulse of Hermes. But in memory, my 
childhood was long, long with interminable hours, 
hours with the pale cheek pressed against the 
window pane, houi-s of mechanical and repeated 
lonely ''games," which had lost their savom-, and 
were kept going by sheer inertness. Not unhappy, 
not fretful, but long, — long, long. It seems to me, 
as I look back to the life in the motherless Isling- 
ton house, as I resumed it in that slow eighth 
year of my life, that time had ceased to move. 
There was a whole age between one tick of the 
eight-day clock in the hall, and the next tick. 
When the milkman went his rounds in our grey 
street, with his eldritch scream over the top of each 
set of area railings, it seemed as though he would 
never disappear again. There was no past and 
no future for me, and the present felt as though 
83 



FATHER AND SON 

it were sealed up in a Leyden jar. Even my 
dreams were interminable, and hung stationary 
from the nightly sky. 

At this time, the street was my theatre, and 
I spent long periods, as I have said, leaning against 
the window. I feel now the coldness of the pane, 
and the feverish heat that was produced, by con- 
trast, in the orbit round the eye. Now and then 
amusing things happened. The onion-man was 
a joy long waited for. This worthy was a tall 
and bony Jersey Protestant with a raucous voice, 
who strode up our street several times a week, 
carrying a yoke across his shoulders, from the 
ends of which hung ropes of onions. He used 
to shout, at abrupt intervals, in a tone which 
might wake the dead: 

Here's your rope. . . . 
i To hang the Pope. . . . 

And a penn'orth of cheese to choke him. 

The cheese appeared to be legendary; he sold 
only onions. My Father did not eat onions, 
but he encouraged this terrible fellow, with his 
wild eyes and long strips of hair because of his 
''godly attitude towards the Papacy," and I 
used to watch him dart out of the front door, 
present his penny, and retire, graciously waving 
back the proffered onion. On the other hand, 
84 



FATHER AND SON 

my Father did not approve of a fat sailor, who 
was a constant passer-by. This man, who was 
probably crazed, used to walk very slowly up 
the centre of our street, vociferating with the 
voice of a bull, 

Wa-a-atch and pray-hay! 
Night and day-hay 1 

This melancholy admonition was the entire 
business of his hfe. He did nothing at all but 
walk up and down the streets of Islington ex- 
horting the inhabitants to watch and pray. I 
do not recollect that this sailor-man stopped 
to collect pennies, and my impression is that he 
was, after his fashion, a volunteer evangehst. 

The tragedy of Mr. Pimch was another, and 
a still greater, delight. I was never allowed to 
go out into the street to mingle with the little 
crowd which gathered under the stage, and as 
I was extremely near-sighted, the impression 
I received was vague. But when, by happy 
chance, the show stopped opposite our door, I 
saw enough of that ancient drama to be thrilled 
with terror and delight. I was much affected 
by the internal troubles of the Punch family; 
I thought that with a httle more tact on the 
part of Mrs. Punch and some restraint held over 
a temper, naturally violent, by Mr. Punch, a 
85 



FATHER AND SON 

great deal of this sad' misunderstanding might 
have been prevented. The momentous close, 
when a figure of shapeless horror appears on the 
stage, and quells the hitherto undaunted Mr. 
Punch, was to me the bouquet of the entire 
performance. When Mr. Punch, losing his nerve, 
points to this shape and says in an awestruck, 
squeaking whisper, ''Who's that? Is it the 
butcher?" and the stern answer comes, ''No, Mr. 
Punch!" And then, "Is it the baker?" "No, 
Mr. Punch ! " " Who is it then? " (this in a squeak 
trembhng with emotion and terror); and then 
the full, loud reply, booming like a judgment-bell, 
"It is the Devil come to take you down to Hell," 
and the form of Punch, with kicking legs, sunken 
in epilepsy on the floor, — all this was solemn and 
exquisite to me beyond words. I was not 
amused — I was deeply moved and exhilarated, 
"purged," as the old phrase hath it, "with pity 
and terror." 

Another joy, in a lighter key, was watching a 
fantastic old man, who came slowly up the street, 
hung about with drums and flutes and kites and 
coloured balls, and bearing over his shoulders a 
great sack. Children and servant-girls used to 
bolt up out of areas, and chaffer with this gaudy 
person, who would presently trudge on, always 
repeating the same set of \A'ords, — 



FATHER AND SON 

Here's your toys 
For girls and boys, 
For bits of brass 
And broken glass, 
(these four lines being spoken in a breathless hurry) 

A penny or a vial-bottell. . . . 
(this being drawled out in an endless wail). 

I was not allowed to go forth and trade with 
this old person, but sometimes our servant- 
maid did, thereby making me feel that if I did 
not hold the rose of merchandise, I was very- 
near it. My experiences with my cousins at 
CHfton had given me the habit of looking out 
into the world, — even though it was only into 
the pale world of our quiet street. 

My Father and I were now great friends. I 
do not doubt that he felt his responsibility to 
fill as far as might be the gap which the death of 
my Mother had made in my existence. I spent 
a large portion of my time in his study, while 
he was writing or drawing, and though very 
little conversation passed between us, I think 
that each enjoyed the companionship of the 
other. There were two, and sometimes three 
aquaria in the room, tanks of sea-water, with 
glass sides, inside which all sorts of creatures 
crawled and swam; these were sources of endless 
pleasure to me, and at this time began to be 
87 



FATHER AND SON 

laid upon me the occasional task of watching and 
afterwards reporting the habits of animals. 

At other times, I dragged a folio volume of the 
'Tenny Cyclopaedia" up to the study with me, 
and sat there reading successive articles on such 
subjects as Parrots, Parthians, Passion-flowers, 
Passover and Pastry, without any invidious prefer- 
ences, all information being equally welcome, 
and equally fugitive. That something of all this 
loose stream of knowledge clung to odd cells 
of the back of my brain seems to be shown by 
the fact that to this day, I occasionally find 
myself aware of some stray useless fact about 
peonies or pemmican or pepper, which I can only 
trace back to the 'Tenny Cyclopaedia" of my 
infancy. 

It will be asked what the attitude of my Father's 
mind was to me, and of mine to his, as regards 
rehgion, at this time, when we were thrown 
together alone so much. It is difficult to reply 
with exactitude. But so far as the former is 
concerned, I think that the extreme violence 
of the spiritual emotions to which my Father had 
been subjected, had now been followed by a 
certain reaction. He had not changed his views 
in any respect, and he was prepared to work out 
the results of them with greater zeal than ever, 
but just at present his religious nature, like his 
88 



FATHER AND SON 

physical nature, was tired out with anxiety and 
sorrow. He accepted the supposition that I was 
entirely with him in all respects, so far, that is to 
say, as a being so rudimentary and feeble as a 
httle child could be. My Mother, in her last hours, 
had dwelt on our unity in God; we were drawn 
together, she said, elect from the world, in a 
tripUcity of faith and joy. She had constantly 
repeated the words: "We shall be one family, 
one song. One Song! one Family!" My Father, 
I think, accepted this as a prophecy, he felt no 
doubt of our triple unity; my Mother had now 
merely passed before us, through a door, into a 
world of hght, where we should presently join 
her, where all things would be radiant and 
bhssful, but where we three would, in some un- 
known way, be particularly drawn together in a 
tie of inexpressible benediction. He fretted at 
the delay; he would fain have taken me by the 
hand, and have joined her in the realms of holi- 
ness and Hght, at once, without this dreary dalli- 
ance with earthly cares. 

He held this confidence and vision steadily 
before him, but nothing availed against the 
melancholy of his natural state. He was con- 
scious of his dull and solitary condition, and he 
saw, too, that it enveloped me. I think his heart 
was, at this time, drawn out towards me in an 



FATHER AND SON 

immense tenderness. Sometimes, when the early 
twiUght descended upon us in the study, and he 
could no longer peer with advantage into the 
depths of his microscope, he would beckon me to 
him silently, and fold me closely in his arms. I 
used to turn my face up to his, patiently and 
wonderingly, while the large, unwilling tears 
gathered in the corners of his eyehds. My 
training had given me a preternatural faculty 
of stillness and we would stay so, without a 
word or a movement, until the darkness filled the 
room. And then, with my httle hand in his, 
we would walk sedately downstairs, to the 
parlour, where we would find that the lamp was 
lighted, and that our melancholy vigil was ended. 
I do not think that at any part of our lives my 
Father and I were drawn so close to one another 
as we were in that summer of 1857. Yet we seldom 
spoke of what lay so warm and fragrant between 
us, the flower-like thought of our Departed. 

The visit to my cousins had made one con- 
siderable change in me. Under the old sohtary 
discipline, my intelligence had grown at the 
expense of my sentiment. I was innocent, but 
inhuman. The long suffering and the death of 
my Mother had awakened my heart, had taught 
me what pain was, but had left me savage and 
morose. I had still no idea of the relations of 
90 



FATHER AND SON 

human beings to one another; I had learned no 
word of that philosophy which comes to the 
children of the poor in the struggle of the street 
and to the children of the well-to-do in the clash 
of the nursery. In other words, I had no human- 
ity ; I had been carefully shielded from the chance 
of ''catching" it, as though it were the most 
dangerous of microbes. But now that I had 
enjoy-ed a httle of the common experience of 
childhood, a great change had come upon me. 
Before I went to Clifton, my mental life was all 
interior, a rack of baseless dream upon dream. 
But, now, I was eager to look out of window, to 
go out in the streets; I was taken with a curiosity 
about human hfe. Even, from my vantage of 
the window-pane, I watched boys and girls go 
by with an interest which began to be almost 
wistful. 

Still I continued to have no young companions. 
But on summer evenings I used to drag my 
Father out, taking the initiative myself, stamping 
in playful impatience at his irresolution, fetching 
his hat and stick, and waiting. We used to sally 
forth at last together, hand in hand, descending 
the Caledonian Road, with all its shops, as far as 
Mother Shipton, or else winding among the 
semi-genteel squares and terraces westward by 
Copenhagen Street, or, best of all, mounting 
91 



FATHER AND SON 

to the Regent's Canal, where we paused to lean 
over the bridge and watch flotillas of ducks 
steer under us, or httle white dogs dash, impo- 
tently furious, from stem to stern of the great, 
lazy barges, painted in a crude vehemence of 
vermilion and azure. These were happy hom-s, 
when the spectre of ReUgion ceased to overshadow 
us for a httle while, when my Father forgot the 
Apocalypse and dropped his austere phraseology, 
and when our bass and treble voices used to ring 
out together over some foolish httle jest or some 
mirthful recollection of his past experiences. 
Little soft oases these, in the hard desert of our 
sandy spiritual life at home. 

There was an unbending, too, when we used 
to sing together, in my case very tunelessly. 
I had inherited a plentiful lack of musical genius 
from my Mother, who had neither ear nor voice, 
and who had said, in the course of her last illness, 
"I shall sing His praise, at length, in strains I 
never could master here below." My Father, 
on the other hand, had some knowledge of the 
principles of vocal music, although not, I am 
afraid, much taste. He had at least great fond- 
ness for singing hymns, in the manner then popu- 
lar with the Evangehcals, very loudly, and so 
slowly that I used to count how many words I 
could read silently, between one syllable of the 
92 



FATHER AND SON 

singing and another. My lack of skill did not 
prevent me from being zealous at these vocal 
exercises, and my Father and I used to sing lustily 
together. The Wesleys, Charlotte Elhott (''JuSt 
as I am without one plea") and James Mont- 
gomery (''For ever with the Lord") represented 
his predilection in hymnology. I acquiesced, but 
that would not have been my independent choice. 
These represented the devotional verse wliich 
made its direct appeal to the evangeUcal mind, 
and served in those "Puseyite" days to counteract 
the High Church poetry founded on ''The Chris- 
tian Year." Of that famous volume I never 
met with a copy until I was grown up, and 
equally unknown in our circle were the hynms of 
Newman, Faber and Neale. 

It was my Father's plan from the first to keep 
me entirely ignorant of the poetry of the High 
Church, which deeply offended his Calvinism; he 
thought that religious truth could be sucked in, 
like mother's milk, from hymns which were godly 
and sound, and yet correctly versified ; and I was 
therefore carefully trained in this direction from 
an early date. But my spirit had rebelled against 
some of these hymns, especially against those 
written — a mighty multitude — by Horatio Bonar; 
naughtily refusing to read Bonar's "I heard the 
voice of Jesus say" to my Mother in our Pimhco 
93 



FATHER AND SON 

lodgings. A secret hostility to this particular 
form of effusion was already, at the age of seven, 
beginning to define itself in my brain, side by 
side with an imctuous infantile conformity. 

I find a difficulty in recalling the precise nature 
of the religious instruction which my Father gave 
me at this time. It was incessant, and it was 
founded on the close inspection of the Bible, 
particularly of the epistles of the New Testament. 
This summer, as my eighth year advanced, we 
read the ''Epistle to the Hebrews" with very 
great deliberation, stopping every moment, that 
my Father might expound it, verse by verse. 
The extraordinary beauty of the language,— 
for instance, the matchless cadences and images 
of the first chapter, — made a certain impression 
upon my imagination, and were (I think) my 
earliest initiation into the magic of hterature. 
I was incapable of defining what I felt, but I 
certainly had a grip in the throat, wliich was in 
its essence a purely aesthetic emotion, when 
my Father read, in his pure, large, ringing voice, 
such passages as ''The heavens are the works of 
Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou remain- 
est, and they all shall wax old as doth a garment, 
and as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and 
they shall be changed; but Thou art the same, 
and Thy years shall not fail." But the dialectic 
94 



FATHER AND SON 

parts of the Epistle puzzled and confused me. 
Such metaphysical ideas as 'laying again the 
foundation of repentance from dead works" and 
"crucifying the Son of God afresh" were not 
successfully brought down to the level of my 
understanding. 

My Father's religious teaching to me was 
almost exclusively doctrinal. He did not ob- 
serve the value of negative education, that is to 
say, of leaving nature alone to fill up the gaps 
which it is her design to deal with at a later and 
riper date. He did not, even, satisfy himself 
with those moral injunctions which should form 
the basis of infantile discipline. He was in a 
tremendous hmiy to push on my spiritual growth, 
and he fed me with theological meat which it was 
impossible for me to digest. Some glimmer of a 
suspicion that he was sailing on the wrong tack 
must, I should suppose, have broken in upon him 
when we had reached the eighth and ninth chap- 
ters of Hebrews, where, addressing readers who 
had been brought up under the Jewish dispensa- 
tion, and had the formalities of the Law of 
Moses in their very blood, the apostle battles 
with their dangerous conservatism. It is a very 
noble piece of spiritual casuistry, but it is signally 
unfitted for the comprehension of a child. Sud- 
denly, by my flushing up with anger and saying, 
95 



FATHER AND SON 

''0 how I do hate that Law," my Father per- 
ceived, and paused in amazement to perceive, 
that I took the Law to be a person of mahgnant 
temper from whose cruel bondage, and from whose 
intolerable tyranny and unfairness, some excellent 
person was crying out to be dehvered. I wished 
to hit Law with my fist, for being so mean and 
unreasonable. 

Upon this, of course, it was necessary to re- 
open the whole line of exposition. My Father, 
without reahsing it, had been talking on his own 
level, not on mine, and now he condescended to 
me. But without very great success. The melo- 
dious language, the divine forensic audacities, the 
magnificent ebb and flow of argimient which 
make the ''Epistle to the Hebrews" such a 
miracle, were far and away beyond my reach, and 
they only bewildered me. Some evangehcal 
children of my generation, I understand, were 
brought up on a work called ''Line upon Line: 
Here a Little, and there a Little." My Father's 
ambition would not submit to anything suggested 
by such a title as that, and he committed, from 
his own point of view, a fatal mistake when he 
sought to build spires and battlements without 
having been at the pains to settle a foundation 
beneath them. 

We were not always reading the "Epistle to 
96 



FATHER AND SON 

the Hebrews," however; not always was my 
flesh being made to creep by having it insisted 
upon that '^ almost all things are by the Law 
pm-ged with blood, and without blood is no re- 
mission of sin." In our lighter moods, we 
turned to the ''Book of Revelation," and chased 
the phantom of Popery through its fuliginous 
pages. My Father, I think, missed my Mother's 
company almost more acutely in his researches 
into prophecy than in anything else. This had 
been their unceasing recreation, and no third 
person could possibly follow the curious path 
which they had hewn for themselves through this 
jungle of sjonbols. But, more and more, my 
Father persuaded himself that I, too, was ini- 
tiated, and by degrees I was made to share in all 
his speculations and interpretations. 

Hand in hand we investigated the number of 
the Beast, which number is six hundred three 
score and six. Hand in hand we inspected the 
nations, to see whether they had the mark of 
Babylon in their foreheads. Hand in hand we 
watched the spirits of devils gathering the kings 
of the earth into the place which is called in 
the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. Our unity 
in these excursions was so delightful, that my 
Father was lulled in any suspicion he might have 
formed that I did not quite understand what it 
97 



FATHER AND SON 

was all about. Nor could he have desired a 
pupil more docile or more ardent than I was in 
my flaming denunciations of the Papacy. 

If there was one institution more than another 
which, at this early stage of my history, I loathed 
and feared, it was what we invariably spoke of as 
"the so-called Chm'ch of Rome." In later years, 
I have met with stout Protestants, gallant 
"Down- with- the-Pope" men from County Antrim, 
and ladies who see the hand of the Jesuits in 
every public and private misfortune. It is the 
habit of a loose and indifferent age to consider 
this dwindling body of enthusiasts with sus- 
picion, and to regard their attitude towards 
Rome as illiberal. But my own feeling is that 
they are all too mild, that their denunciations 
err on the side of the anod}Tie. I have no 
longer the slightest w^sh myself to denounce 
the Roman communion, but if it is to be done, 
I have an idea that the latter-day Protestants 
do not know how to do it. In Lord Beacons- 
field's phrase, these anti-Pope men "don't under- 
stand their own silly business." They make 
concessions and allowances, they put on gloves 
to touch the accursed thing. 

Not thus did we approach the Scarlet Woman 
in the 'fifties. We palliated nothing, we be- 
lieved in no good intentions, we used (I myself 



FATHER AND SON 

used, in my tender innocency) language of the 
seventeenth century such as is now no longer 
introduced into any species of controversy. As 
a Httle boy, when I thought, with intense vague- 
ness, of the Pope, I used to shut my eyes tight 
and clench my fists. We welcomed any social 
disorder in any part of Italy, as likely to be 
annoying to the Papacy. If there was a custom- 
house officer stabbed in a fracas at Sassari, we 
gave loud thanks that liberty and light were 
breaking in upon Sardinia. If there was an 
unsuccessful attempt to murder the Grand Duke, 
we hfted up our voices to celebrate the faith 
and sufferings of the dear persecuted Tuscans, 
and the record of some apocryphal monstrosity 
in Naples would only reveal to us a glorious 
opening for Gospel energy. My Father cele- 
brated the announcement in the newspapers 
of a considerable emigration from the Papal 
Dominions, by rejoicing at ^Hhis out-crowding 
of many, throughout the harlot's domain, from 
her sins and her plagues." 

No, the Protestant League may consider itself 
to be an earnest and active body, but I can never 
look upon its efforts as anything but lukewarm, 
standing, as I do, with the light of other days 
around me. As a child, whatever I might ques- 
tion, I never doubted the turpitude of Rome. I 
99 



FATHER AND SON 

do not think I had formed any idea whatever of 
the character or pretensions or practices of the 
CathoHc Church, or indeed of what it consisted, 
or its nature, but I regarded it with a vague 
terror as a wild beast, the only good point about 
it being that it was very old and was soon to die. 
When I turned to Jukes or Newton for further 
detail, I could not understand what they said. 
Perhaps, on the whole, there was no disadvan- 
tage in that. 

It is possible that some one may have observed 
to my Father that the conditions of our life 
were unfavourable to our health, although I 
hardly think that he would have encouraged 
any such advice. As I look back upon this far- 
away time, I am surprised at the absence in it 
of any figures but our own. He and I together, 
now in the study among the sea-anemones and 
star-fishes; now on the canal-bridge, looking 
down at the ducks ; now at our hard httle meals, 
served up as those of a dreamy widower are 
Ukely to be when one maid-of-all-work provides 
them, now under the lamp at the maps we both 
loved so much, this is what I see: — no third 
presence is ever with us. Whether it occurred 
to himself that such a solitude a deux was ex- 
cellent, in the long run, for neither of us, or 
whether any chance visitor or one of the ''saints," 
100 



FATHER AND SON 

who used to see me at the Room every Sunday 
morning, suggested that a female influence might 
put a httle rose-colour into my pasty cheeks, 
I know not. All I am sure of is that one day, 
towards the close of the summer, as I was gazing 
into the street, I saw a four-wheeled cab stop 
outside our door, and deposit, with several 
packages, a strange lady, who was shown up into 
my Father's study and was presently brought 
down and introduced to me. 

Miss Marks, as I shall take the hberty of 
calling this person, was so long a part of my 
hfe that I must pause to describe her. She 
was tall, rather gaunt, with high cheek-bones; 
her teeth were prominent and very white; her 
eyes were china-blue, and were always absolutely 
fixed, wide open, on the person she spoke to; 
her nose was inclined to be red at the tip. She 
had a kind, hearty, sharp mode of talking, but 
did not exercise it much, being on the whole 
taciturn. She was bustling and nervous, not 
particularly refined, not quite, I imagine, what 
is called "a lady." I supposed her, if I thought 
of the matter at all, to be very old, but perhaps 
she may have seen, when we knew her first, 
some forty-five summers. Miss Marks was an 
orphan, depending upon her work for her living; 
she would not, in these days of examinations, 
101 



FATHER AND SON 

have come up to the necessary educational 
standards, but she had enjoyed experience in 
teaching, and was prepared to be a conscientious 
and careful governess, up to her hghts. I was 
now informed by my Father that it was in this 
capacity that she would in future take her place 
in oui' household. I was not informed, what I 
gradually learned by observation, that she would 
also act in it as housekeeper. 

Miss Marks was a somewhat grotesque per- 
sonage, and might easily be painted as a kind of 
eccentric Dickens character, a mixture of Mrs. 
Pipchin and Miss Sally Brass. I will confess 
that when, in years to come, I read "Dombey 
and Son," certain features of Mrs. Pipchin did 
irresistibly remind me of my excellent past gov- 
erness. I can imagine Miss Marks saying, but 
with a facetious intent, that children who sniffed 
would not go to heaven. But I was instantly 
ashamed of the parallel, because my gaimt old 
friend was a thoroughly good and honest woman, 
not intelligent and not graceful, but desirous in 
every way to do her duty. Her duty to me she 
certainly did, and I am afraid I hardly rewarded 
her with the , devotion she deserved. From the 
first, I was indifferent to her wishes, and, as much 
as was convenient, I ignored her existence. She 
held no power over my attention, and if I ac- 
102 



FATHER AND SON 

cepted her guidance along the path of instruc- 
tion, it was because, odd as it may sound, I really- 
loved knowledge. I accepted her company with- 
out objection, and though there were occasional 
outbreaks of tantrums on both sides, we got on 
very well together for several years. I did not, 
however, at any time surrender my inward will to 
the wishes of Miss Marks. 

In the circle of our life the rehgious element 
took so preponderating a place, that it is impos- 
sible to avoid mentioning, what might other- 
wise seem unimportant, the theological views 
of Miss Marks. How my Father had discovered 
her, or from what field of educational enterprise 
he plucked her in her prime, I never knew, but 
she used to mention that my Father's ministra- 
tions had "opened her eyes," from which "scales" 
had fallen. She had accepted, on their presenta- 
tion to her, the entire gamut of his principles. 
Miss Marks was accustomed, while putting me 
to bed, to dwell darkly on the incidents of her 
past, which had, I fear, been an afflicted one. 
I believe I do her rather limited intelligence 
no injury when I say that it was prepared to 
swallow, at one mouthful, whatever my Father 
presented to it, so delighted was its way-worn 
possessor to find herself in a comfortable, or, at 
least, an independent position. She soon bowed, if 
103 



FATHER AND SON 

there was indeed any resistance from the first, 
very contentedly in the House of Rinimon, 
learning to repeat, with marked fluency, the 
customary formulas and shibboleths. On my 
own religious development she had no great 
influence. Any such guttering theological rush- 
light as Miss Marks might dutifully exhibit 
faded for me in the blaze of my Father's glaring 
beacon-lamp of faith. 

Hardly was Miss Marks settled in the family, 
than my Father left us on an expedition about 
which my curiosity was exercised, but not, 
imtil later, satisfied. He had gone, as we after- 
wards found, to South Devon, to a point on 
the coast which he had known of old. Here 
he had hired a horse, and had ridden about 
until he saw a spot he hked, where a villa was 
being built on speculation. Nothing equals the 
courage of these recluse men; my Father got off 
his horse, and tied it to the gate, and then he 
went in and bought the house on a ninety-nine 
years' lease. I need hardly say that he had 
made the matter a subject of the most earnest 
prayer, and had entreated the Lord for guidance. 
When he felt attracted to this particular villa, 
he did not doubt that he was directed to it in 
answer to his supphcation, and he wasted no 
time in further balancing or inquiring. On 
104 



FATHER AND SON 

my eighth birthday, with bag and baggage 
complete, we all made the toilful journey down 
into Devonshire, and I was a town-child no 
longer. 



105 



CHAPTER V 

A NEW element now entered into my life, a fresh 
rival arose to compete for me with my Father's 
dogmatic theology. This rival was the Sea, 
When Wordsworth was a httle child, the presence 
of the mountains and the clouds hghted up his 
spirit with gleams that were Hke the flashing of 
a shield. He has described, in the marvellous 
pages of the 'Trelude," the impact of nature 
upon the infant soul, but he has described it 
vaguely and faintly, with some '^ infirmity of 
love for days disowned by memory," — I think 
because he was brought up in the midst of spectac- 
ular beauty, and could name no moment, mark 
no ''here" or ''now," when the wonder broke 
upon him. At the age of twice five summers, 
he thought it was, that he began to hold imcon- 
scious intercourse with natm-e, "drinking in a 
pure organic pleasure" from the floating mists 
and winding waters. Perhaps, in his anxiety 
to be truthful, and in the absence of any record, 
106 



FATHER AND SON 

he put the date of this conscious rapture too 
late rather than too early. Certainly my own 
impregnation with the obscui'ely-defined but 
keenly-felt loveliness of the open sea dates from 
the first week of my ninth year. 

The village, on the outskirts of which we 
had taken up our abode, was built parallel to 
the cliff-line above the shore, but half a mile 
inland. For a long time after the date I have 
now reached, no other form of natural scenery 
than the sea had any effect upon me at all. The 
tors of the distant moor might be* drawn in 
deep blue against the pallor of our morning or 
our evening sky, but I never looked at them. 
It was the Sea, always the sea, nothing but. the 
sea. From our house, or from the field at the 
back of our house, or from any part of the village 
itself, there was no appearance to suggest that 
there could He anything in an easterly direction 
to break the infinitude of red ploughed fields. 
But on that earliest morning, how my heart 
remembers! we hastened, — Miss Marks, the maid, 
and I between them, — along a couple of high- 
walled lanes, when suddenly, far below us, in an 
immense arc of light, there stretched the enor- 
mous plain of waters. We had but to cross a 
step or two of downs, when the hollow sides of 
the great limestone cove yawned at our feet, 
107 



FATHER AND SON 

descending, like a broken cup, down, down to 
the moon of snow-white shingle and the expanse 
of blue-green sea. 

In these twentieth-century days, a careful 
municipahty has studded the down with rustic 
seats and has shut its dangers out with raiUngs, 
has cut a winding carriage-drive round the 
curves of the cove down to the shore, and has 
planted sausage-laurels at intervals in clearings 
made for that aesthetic purpose. When last I 
saw the place, thus smartened and secured, 
with its hair in curl-papers and its feet in patent- 
leathers, I turned from it in anger and disgust, 
and could almost have wept. I suppose that 
to those who knew it in no other guise, it may 
still have beauty. No parish councils, benefi- 
cent and shrewd, can obscure the lustre of the 
waters or compress the vastness of the sky. 
But what man could do to make wild beauty 
ineffectual, tame and empty, has amply been 
performed at Oddicombe. 

Very different was it fifty years ago, in its un- 
couth majesty. No road, save the merest goat- 
path, led down its concave wilderness, in which 
loose furze-bushes and untrimmed brambles wan- 
toned into the likeness of trees, each draped in 
audacious tissue of wild clematis. Through this 
fantastic maze the traveller wound his way, led 
108 



FATHER AND SON 

by little other clue than by the instinct of descent. 
For me, as a child, it meant the labour of a long, 
an endless morning, to descend to* the snow-white 
pebbles, to sport at the edge of the cold, sharp 
sea, and then to climb up home again, slipping 
in the sticky red mud, clutching at the smooth 
boughs of the wild ash, toihng, toiling upwards 
into flat land out of that hollow world of rocks. 

On the first occasion, I recollect, our Cockney 
housemaid, enthusiastic young creature that 
she was, flung herself down upon her knees, 
and drank of the salt waters. Miss Marks, 
more instructed in phenomena, refrained, but I, 
although I was perfectly aware what the taste 
would be, insisted on sipping a few drops from 
the palm of my hand. This was a sUght recur- 
rence of what I have called my ''natural magic" 
practices, which had passed into the background 
of my mind, but had not quite disappeared. I 
recollect that I thought I might secure some 
power of walking on the sea, if I drank of it — a 
perfectly irrational movement of mind, like those 
of savages. 

My great desire was to walk out over the 
sea as far as I could, and then lie flat on 
it, face downwards, and peer into the depths. 
I was tormented with this ambition, and, like 
many grown-up people, was so fully occupied 
109 



FATHER AND SON 

by these vain and ridiculous desires that I 
neglected the actual natural pleasures around 
me. The idea was not quite so demented as 
it may seem, because we were in the habit of 
singing, as well as reading, of those enraptured 
beings who spend their days in ''flinging down 
their golden crowns upon the jasper sea." Why, 
I argued, should I not be able to fling dov/n 
my straw hat upon the tides of Oddicombe? 
And, without question, a majestic scene upon 
the Lake of Gennesaret had also inflamed my 
fancy. Of all these things, of course, I was 
careful to speak to no one. 

It was not with Miss Marks, however, but 
with my Father, that I became accustomed to 
make the laborious and exquisite journeys down 
to the sea and back again. His work as a natu- 
ralist eventually took him, laden with implements, 
to the rock-pools on the shore, and I was in 
attendance as an acolyte. But our earhest 
winter in South Devon was darkened for us both by 
disappointments, the cause of which lay, at the 
time, far out of my reach. In the spirit of my 
Father were then running, with fm'ious velocity, 
two hostile streams of influence. 1 was standing, 
just now, thinking of these things, where the 
Cascine ends in the wooded point which is carved 
out sharply by the lion-coloured swirl of the 
110 



FATHER AND SON 

Arno on the one side and by the pure flow of the 
Mugnone on the other. The rivers meet, and 
run parallel, but there comes a moment when the 
one or the other must conquer, and it is the 
yellow vehemence that drowns the purer tide. 

So, through my Father's brain, in that year of 
scientific crisis, 1857, there rushed two kinds 
of thought, each absorbing, each convincing, 
yet totally irreconcilable. There is a pecuhar 
agony in the paradox that truth has two forms, 
each of them indisputable, yet each antagonistic 
to the other. It was this discovery, that there 
were two theories of physical hfe, each of which 
was true, but the truth of each incompatible 
with the truth of the other, which shook the 
spirit of my Father with pertm^bation. It was 
not, really, a paradox, it was a fallacy, if he 
could only have known it, but he allowed the 
turbid volume of superstition to drown the 
dehcate stream of reason. He took one step in 
the service of truth, and then he drew back in an 
agony, and accepted the servitude of error. 

This was the great moment in the history 
of thought when the theory of the mutability 
of species was preparing to throw a flood of 
hght upon all departments of human specula- 
tion and action. It was becoming necessary to 
stand emphatically in one army or the other. 
Ill 



FATHER AND SON 

Lyell was surrounding himself with disciples, 
who were making strides in the direction of 
discovery. Darwin had long been collecting 
facts with regard to the variation of animals 
and plants. Hooker and Wallace, Asa Gray 
and even Agassiz, each in his own sphere, were 
coming closer and closer to a perception of that 
secret which was first to reveal itself clearly 
to the patient and humble genius of Darwin. 
In the year before, in 1856, Darwin, under 
pressure from Lyell, had begun that modest 
statement of the new revelation, that ''abstract 
of an essay," which developed so mightily into 
"The Origin of Species." Wollaston's ''Vari- 
ation of Species" had just appeared, and had 
been a nine days' wonder in the wilderness. 

On the other side, the reactionaries, although 
never dreaming of the fate which hung over 
them, had not been idle. In 1857 the astound- 
ing question had for the first time been pro- 
pounded with contumely, "What, then, did we 
come from an orang-outang?" The famous 
"Vestiges of Creation" had been supplying a 
sugar-and-water panacea for those who could 
not escape from the trend of evidence, and who 
yet clung to revelation. Owen was encouraging 
reaction by resisting, with all the strength of his 
prestige, the theory of the mutability of species. 
112 



FATHER AND SON 

In this period of intellectual ferment, as when 
a great political revolution is being planned, many- 
possible adherents were confidentially tested with 
hints and encouraged to reveal their bias in a 
whisper. It was the notion of Lyell, himself a 
great mover of men, that before the doctrine of 
natural selection was given to a world which 
would be sure to lift up at it a howl of execration, 
a certain body-guard of sound and experienced 
naturalists, expert in the description of species, 
should be privately made aware of its tenour. 
Among those who were thus initiated, or ap- 
proached with a view towards possible illumina- 
tion, was my Father. He was spoken to by 
Hooker, and later on by Darwin, after meetings 
of the Royal Society in the summer of 1857. 

My Father's attitude towards the theory of 
natural selection was critical in his career, and, 
oddly enough, it exercised an immense influ- 
ence on my own experience as a child. Let it 
be admitted at once, mournful as the admission 
is, that every instinct in his intelligence went 
out at first to greet the new light. It had hardly 
done so, when a recollection of the opening 
chapter of Genesis checked it at the outset. He 
consulted with Carpenter, a great investigator, 
but one who was fully as incapable as himself of 
remodelling his ideas with regard to the old, 
113 



FATHER AND SON 

accepted hypotheses. They both determined, 
on various grounds, to have nothing to do with 
the terrible theory, but to hold steadily to the 
law of the fixity of species. It was exactly at 
this juncture that we left London, and the 
slight and occasional, but always extremely 
salutary personal intercourse with men of scien- 
tific leading which my Father had enjoyed at 
the British Museum and at the Royal Society 
came to an end. His next act was to burn his 
ships, down to the last beam and log out of 
which a raft could have been made. By a strange 
act of wilfulness, he closed the doors upon him- 
self for ever. 

My Father had never admired Sir Charles 
Lyell. I think that the famous "Lord Chan- 
cellor manner" of the geologist intimidated 
him, and we undervalue the intelligence of those 
whose conversation puts us at a disadvantage. 
For Darwin and Hooker, on the other hand, 
he had a profound esteem, and I know not 
whether this had anything to do with the fact 
that he chose, for his impetuous experiment in 
reaction, the field of geology, rather than that 
of zoology or botany. Lyell had been threaten- 
ing to pubhsh a book on the geological history 
of Man, which was to be a bomb-shell flung into 
the camp of the catastrophists. My Father, 
114 



FATHER AND SON 

after long reflection, prepared a theory of his 
own, which, as he fondly hoped, would take 
the wind out of Lyell's sails, and justify geology 
to godly readers of "Genesis." It was, very 
briefly, that there had been no gradual modifica- 
tion of the surface of the earth, or slow develop- 
ment of organic forms, but that when the catas- 
trophic act of creation took place, the world 
presented, instantly, the structural appearance 
of a planet on which life had long existed. 

The theory, coarsely enough, and to my Father's 
great indignation, was defined by a hasty press 
as being this — that God hid the fossils in the 
rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity. 
In truth, it was the logical and inevitable con- 
clusion of accepting, literally, the doctrine of a 
sudden act of creation; it emphasised the fact 
that any breach in the circular course of nature 
could be conceived only on the supposition that 
the object created bore false witness to past 
processes, which had never taken place. For 
instance, Adam would certainly possess hair and 
teeth and bones in a condition which it must 
have taken many years to accomplish, yet he was 
created full-grown yesterday. He would cer- 
tainly — though Sir Thomas Browne denied it — 
display an omphalos, yet no umbilical cord had 
ever attached him to a mother. 
115 



FATHER AND SON 

Never was a book cast upon the waters with 
greater anticipations of success than was this 
curious, this obstinate, this fanatical volume. 
My Father hved in a fever of suspense, waiting 
for the tremendous issue. This ''Omphalos" 
of his, he thought, was to bring all the turmoil 
of scientific speculation to a close, fling geology 
into the arms of Scripture, and make the lion 
eat grass with the lamb. It was not surprising, 
he admitted, that there had been experienced 
an ever-increasing discord between the facts 
which geology brings to light and the direct 
statements of the early chapters of ''Genesis." 
Nobody was to blame for that. My Father, and 
my Father alone, possessed the secret of the 
enigma; he alone held the key which could 
smoothly open the lock of geological mystery. 
He offered it, with a glowing gesture, to atheists 
and Christians alike. This was to be the universal 
panacea; this the system of intellectual thera- 
peutics which could not but heal all the maladies 
of the age. But, alas! atheists and Christians 
alike looked at it and laughed, and threw it 
away. 

In the course of that dismal winter, as the post 

began to bring in private letters, few and chilly, 

and public reviews, many and scornful, my 

Father looked in vain for the approval of the 

116 



FATHER AND SON 

churches, and in vain for the acquiescence of the 
scientific societies, and in vain for the gratitude 
of those ''thousands of thinking persons," which 
he had rashly assured himself of receiving. 
As his reconciliation of Scripture statements 
and geological deductions was welcomed no- 
where; as Darwin continued silent, and the 
youthful Huxley was scornful, and even Charles 
Kingsley, from whom my Father had expected 
the most instant appreciation, wrote that he 
could not ''give up the painful and slow con- 
clusion of five and twenty years' study of geology, 
and believe that God has written on the rocks 
one enormous and superfluous lie," — as all this 
happened or failed to happen, a gloom, cold 
and dismal, descended upon our morning tea- 
cups. It was what the poets mean by an "in- 
spissated" gloom; it thickened day by day, 
as hope and self-confidence evaporated in thin 
clouds of disappointment. My Father was not 
prepared for such a fate. He had been the spoiled 
darling of the public, the constant favourite 
of the press, and now, like the dark angels of 
old, 

so huge a rout 
Encumoered him with ruin. 

He could not recover from amazement at 
having offended everybody by an enterprise 
117 



FATHER AND SON 

which had been undertaken in the cause of 
universal reconcihation. 

Duiing that grim season, my Father was no 
Uvely companion, and circumstance after cir- 
cimistance combined to drive him further from 
humanity. He missed more than ever the S3an- 
pathetic ear of my Mother; there was present 
to support him nothing of that artful, female 
casuistry which insinuates into the wounded 
consciousness of a man the conviction that, 
after all, he is right and all the rest of the world 
is wrong. My Father used to tramp in solitude 
round and round the red ploughed field which 
was going to be his lawn, or, sheltering himself 
from the thin Devonian rain, pace up and down 
the still-naked verandah where blossoming creep- 
ers were to be. And I think that there was 
added to his chagrin with all his fellow mortals 
a first tincture of that heresy which was to attack 
him later on. It was now that, I fancy, he began, 
in his depression, to be angry with God. How 
much devotion had he given, how many sacri- 
fices had he made, only to be left storming 
round this red morass with no one in all the 
world to care for him except one pale-faced 
child with its cheek pressed to the window! 

After one or two brilliant excursions to the 
sea, winter, in its dampest, muddiest, most 
118 



FATHER AND SON 

languid form, had fallen upon us and shut us 
in. It was a dreary winter for the wifeless 
man and the motherless boy. We had come 
into the house, in precipitate abandonment to 
that supposed answer to prayer, a great deal 
too soon. In order to rake together the lump 
sum for buying it, my Father had denuded 
himself of almost everything, and our sticks of 
chairs and tables filled but two or three rooms. 
Half the little house, or ''villa" as we called it, 
was not papered, two-thirds were not furnished. 
The workmen were still finishing the outside 
when we arrived, and in that connection I recall 
a httle incident which exhibits my Father's 
morbid delicacy of conscience. He was accus- 
tomed, in his brighter moments — and this was 
before the pubhcation of his ''Omphalos" — 
occasionally to sing loud Dorsetshire songs of 
his early days, in a strange, broad Wessex Hngo 
that I loved. One October afternoon he and I 
were sitting on the verandah, and my Father was 
singing; just round the corner, out of sight, two 
carpenters were putting up the framework of a 
greenhouse. In a pause, one of them said to 
his fellow: "He can zing a zong, zo well's another, 
though he be a minister." My Father, who was 
holding my hand loosely, clutched it, and look- 
ing up, I saw his eyes darken. He never sang 
119 



FATHER AND SON 

a secular song again during the whole of his 
life. 

Later in the year, and after his literary mis- 
fortune, his conscience became more trouble- 
some than ever. I think he considered the fail- 
ure of his attempt at the reconciliation of science 
with religion to have been intended by God 
as a punishment for something he had done or 
left undone. In those brooding tramps round 
and round the garden, his soul was on its knees 
searching the corners of his conscience for some 
sin of omission or commission, and one by one 
every pleasure, every recreation, every trifle 
scraped out of the dust of past experience, was 
magnified into a huge offence. He thought that 
the smallest evidence of levity, the least unbend- 
ing to human instinct, might be seized by those 
around him as evidence of inconsistency, and 
might lead the weaker brethren into offence. 
The incident of the carpenters and the comic 
song is typical of a condition of mind which now 
possessed my Father, in which act after act be- 
came taboo, not because each was sinful in itself, 
but because it might lead others into sin. 

I have the conviction that Miss Marks was 

now mightily afraid of my Father. Whenever 

she could, she withdrew to the room she called 

her ''boudoir," a small, chilly apartment, sparsely 

120 



FATHER AND SON 

furnished, looking over what was in process of 
becoming the vegetable garden. Very properly, 
that she might have some sanctuary, Miss Marks 
forbade me to enter this virginal bower, which, 
of coiirse, became to me an object of harrowing 
curiosity. Through the key-hole I could see 
practically nothing; one day I contrived to slip 
inside, and discovered that there was nothing 
to see but a plain bedstead and a toilet-table, 
void of all attraction. In this ''boudoir," on 
winter afternoons, a fire would be Hghted, and 
Miss Marks would withdraw to it, not seen by us 
any more between high-tea and the apoca- 
lyptic exercise known as ''worship" — in less 
strenuous households much less austerely prac- 
tised under the name of "family prayers." Left 
meanwhile to our own devices, my Father would 
mainly be reading, his book or paper held close 
up to the candle, while his lips and heavy eye- 
brows occasionally quivered and palpitated, with 
literary ardour, in a manner strangely exciting 
to me. Miss Marks, in a very high cap, and 
her large teeth shining, would occasionally appear 
in the doorway, desiring, with spurious geniality, 
to know how we were "getting on." But on 
these occasions neither of us rephed to Miss 
Marks. 
Sometimes, in the course of this winter, my 
121 



FATHER AND SON 

Father and I had long cosy talks together over 
the fire. Our favourite subject was mui'ders. 
I wonder whether little boys of eight, soon to 
go up-stairs alone at night, often discuss violent 
crime with a widower-papa? The practice, I 
cannot help thinking, is unusual; it was, how- 
ever, consecutive with us. We tried other 
secular subjects, but we were sure to come 
round at last to ^'what do you suppose they 
really did with the body?" I was told, a thrilled 
listener, the adventure of Mrs. Manning, who 
killed a gentleman on the stairs and buried 
him in quick-lime in the back-kitchen, and it 
was at this time that I learned the useful histor- 
ical fact, which abides with me after half a 
century, that Mrs. Manning was hanged in black 
satin, which thereupon went wholly out of fashion 
in England. I also heard about Burke and 
Hare, whose story nearly froze me into stone 
with horror. 

These were crimes which appear in the chron- 
icles. But who will tell me what ''the Carpet- 
bag Mystery" was, which my Father and I 
discussed evening after evening? I have never 
come across a whisper of it since, and I suspect 
it of having been a hoax. As I recall tne details, 
people in a boat, passing down the Thames, 
saw a carpet-bag hung high in air, on one of the 
122 



FATHER AND SON 

projections of a pier of Waterloo Bridge. Being 
with difficulty dragged down — or perhaps up — 
this bag was found to be full of human remains, 
dreadful butcher's business of joints and frag- 
ments. Persons were missed, were identified, 
were again denied — the whole is a vapour in 
my memory which shifts as I try to define it. 
But clear enough is the picture I hold of myself, 
in a high chair, on the left-hand side of the sitting- 
room fire-place, the leaping flames reflected in 
the glass-case of tropical insects on the opposite 
wall, and my Father, leaning anxiously forward, 
with uplifted finger, emphasising to me the pros 
and cons of the horrible carpet-bag evidence. 

I suppose that my interest in these discus- 
sions — and Heaven knows I was animated 
enough — amused and distracted my Father, 
whose idea of a suitable theme for childhood's 
ear now seems to me surprising. I soon found 
that these subjects were not welcome to every- 
body, for, starting the Carpet-bag Mystery one 
morning with Miss Marks, in the hope of de- 
laying my arithmetic lesson, she fairly threw 
her apron over her ears, and told me, from that 
vantage, that if I did not desist at once, she 
should scream. 

Occasionally we took winter walks together, 
my Father and I, down some lane that led to a 
123 



FATHER AND SON 

sight of the sea, or over the roUing downs. We 
tried to recapture the charm of those dehghtful 
strolls in London, when we used to lean over 
the bridges and watch the ducks. But we 
could not recover this pleasure. My Father 
was deeply enwoven in the chain of his own 
thoughts, and would stalk on, without a word, 
buried in angry reverie. If he spoke to me, 
on these excursions, it was a pain to me to answer 
him. I could talk on easy terms with him 
indoors, seated in my high chair, with our heads 
on a level, but it was intolerably laborious to 
look up into the firmament and converse with 
a dark face against the sky. The actual exer- 
cise of walking, too, was very exhausting to me; 
the bright red mud, to the strange colour of 
which I could not for a long while get accustomed, 
becoming caked about my little shoes, and 
wearying me extremely. I would grow petulant 
and cross, contradict my Father, and oppose 
his whims. These walks were distressing to us 
both, yet he did not like to walk alone, and he 
had no other friend. However, as the winter 
advanced, they had to be abandoned, and the 
habit of our taking a ''constitutional" together 
was never resumed. 

I look back upon myself at this time as upon 
a cantankerous, ill-tempered and unobliging child. 
124 



FATHER AND SON 

The only excuse I can offer is that I really was 
not well. The change to Devonshire had not 
suited me; my health gave the excellent Miss 
Marks some anxiety, but she was not ready 
in resource. The dampness of the house was 
terrible ; indoors and out, the atmosphere seemed 
soaked in chilly vapours. Under my bed-clothes 
at night I shook Uke a jelly unable to sleep for 
cold, though I was heaped with coverings, while 
my skin was all puckered with goose-flesh. I 
could eat nothing soUd, without suffering im- 
mediately from violent hiccough, so that much 
of my time was spent lying prone on my back 
upon the hearth-rug, awakening the echoes 
like a cuckoo. Miss Marks, therefore, cut off 
all food but milk-sop, a loathly bowl of which 
appeared at every meal. In consequence the 
hiccough lessened, but my strength dechned 
with it. I languished in a perpetual catarrh. 
I was roused to a consciousness that I was not 
considered well by the fact that my Father 
prayed pubhcly at morning and evening ''wor- 
ship" that if it was the Lord's will to take me 
to himself there might be no doubt whatever 
about my being a sealed child of God and an 
inheritor of glory. I was partly disconcerted 
by, partly vain of, this open advertisement of 
my ailments. 

125 



FATHER AND SON 

Of our dealings with the ''Saints/' a fresh 
assortment of whom met us on our arrival in 
Devonshire, I shall speak presently. My Father's 
austerity of behaviour was, I think, perpetually 
accentuated by his fear of doing anything to 
offend the consciences of these persons, whom 
he supposed, no doubt, to be more sensitive 
than they really were. He was fond of saying 
that ''a very little stain upon the conscience 
makes a wide breach in our communion with 
God," and he counted possible errors of conduct 
by hundreds and by thousands. It was in this 
winter that his attention was particularly drawn 
to the festival of Christmas, which, apparently, 
he had scarcely noticed in London. 

On the subject of all feasts of the Church he held 
views of an almost grotesque pecuharity. He 
looked upon each of them as nugatory and worth- 
less, but the keeping of Christmas appeared to 
him by far the most hateful, and nothing less 
than an act of idolatry. ''The very word is Pop- 
ish," he used to exclaim, "Christ's Mass!" 
pursing up his lips with the gesture of one 
who tastes assafoetida by accident. Then he 
would adduce the antiquity of the so-called feast, 
adapted from horrible heathen rites, and itself 
a soiled relic of the abominable Yule-Tide. 
He would denounce the horrors of Christmas 
126 



FATHER AND SON 

until it almost made me blush to look at a holly- 
berry. 

On Chi'istmas Day of this year 1857 our villa 
saw a very unusual sight. My Father had 
given strictest charge that no difference what- 
ever was to be made in om- meals on that day; 
the dinner was to be neither more copious than 
usual nor less so. He was obeyed, but the 
servants, secretly rebellious, made a small plum- 
pudding for themselves. (I discovered after- 
wards, with pain, that Miss Marks received a 
sHce of it in her boudoir.) Early in the after- 
noon, the maids, — of whom we were now ad- 
vanced to keeping two, — kindly remarked that 
''the poor dear child ought to have a bit, any- 
how," and wheedled me into the kitchen, where 
I ate a shce of plum-pudding. Shortly I began 
to feel that pain inside which in my frail state 
was inevitable, and my conscience smote me 
violently. At length I could bear my spiritual 
anguish no longer, and bursting into the study 
I called out: ''Oh! Papa, Papa, I have eaten 
of flesh offered to idols! " It took some time, 
between my sobs, to explain what had hap- 
pened. Then my Father sternly said: "Where 
is the accursed thing?" I explained that as 
much as was left of it was still on the kitchen 
table. He took me by the hand, and ran with 
127 



FATHER AND SON 

me into the midst of the startled servants, seized 
what remained of the pudding, and with the plate 
in one hand and me still tight in the other, ran 
till we reached the dust-heap, when he flung the 
idolatrous confectionery on to the middle of the 
ashes, and then raked it deep down into the 
mass. The suddenness, the violence, the velocity 
of this extraordinary act made an impression 
on my memory which nothing will ever efface. 
The key is lost by which I might unlock the per- 
verse malady from which my Father's conscience 
seemed to suffer during the whole of this melan- 
choly winter. But I think that a dislocation of 
his intellectual system had a great deal to do with 
it. Up to this point in his career, he had, as we 
have seen, nourished the delusion that science 
and revelation could be mutually justified, that 
some sort of compromise was possible. With 
great and ever greater distinctness, his investi- 
gations had shown him that in all departments 
of organic nature there are visible the evidences 
of slow modification of forms, of the type devel- 
oped by the pressure and practice of aeons. This 
conviction had been borne in upon him until it 
was positively irresistible. Where was his place, 
then, as a sincere and accurate observer? Mani- 
festly, it was with the pioneers of the new truth, 
it was with Darwin, Wallace and Hooker. But 
128 



FATHER AND SON 

did not the second chapter of '^Genesis" say that 
in six days the heavens and earth were finished, 
and the host of them, and that on the seventh 
day God ended his work which he had made? 

Here was a dilemma! Geology certainly seemed 
to be true, but the Bible, which was God's word, 
was true. If the Bible said that all things in 
Heaven and Earth were created in six days, cre- 
ated in six days they were, — in six hteral days of 
twenty-four hours each. The evidences of sponta- 
neous variation of form, acting, over an immense 
space of time, upon ever-modifying organic struct- 
ures, seemed overwhelming, but they must either 
be brought into line with the six-day labour of 
creation, or they must be rejected. I have al- 
ready shown how my Father worked out the in- 
genious ''Omphalos" theory in order to justify 
himself as a strictly scientific observer who was 
also a humble slave of revelation. But the old 
convention and the new rebelhon would aUke 
have none of his compromise. 

To a mind so acute and at the same time so 
narrow as that of my Father — a mind which is 
all logical and positive without breadth, without 
suppleness and without imagination — to be sub- 
jected to a check of this kind is agony. It has 
not the relief of a smaller nature, which escapes 
from the dilemma by some foggy formula; nor 
129 



FATHER AND SON 

the resolution of a larger nature to take to it 
wings and surmount the obstacle. My Father, 
although half suffocated by the emotion of being 
Ufted, as it were, on the great biological wave, 
never dreamed of letting go his clutch of the 
ancient tradition, but hung there, strained and 
buffeted. It is extraordinary that he — an ' ' honest 
hodman of science," as Huxley once called him 
— should not have been content to allow others, 
whose horizons were wider than his could be, to 
pursue those purely intellectual surveys for 
which he had no species of aptitude. As a col- 
lector of facts and marshaller of observations, 
he had not a rival in that age; his very absence 
of imagination aided him in his work. But he 
was more an attorney than a philosopher, and he 
lacked that subhme humiUty which is the crown 
of genius. For, this obstinate persuasion that 
he alone knew the mind of God, that he alone 
could interpret the designs of the Creator, what 
did it result from if not from a congenital lack 
of that highest modesty which rephes ''I do not 
know" even to the questions which Faith, with 
menacing finger, insists on having most positively 
answered? 



130 



CHAPTER VI 

During the first year of our life in Devonshire, 
the ninth year of my age, my Father's existence, 
and therefore mine, was almost entirely divided 
between attending to the little community of 
"Saints" in the village and collecting, examin- 
ing and describing marine creatures from the sea- 
shore. In the course of these twelve months, 
we had scarcely any social distractions of any 
kind, and I never once crossed the bounds of the 
parish. After the worst of the winter was over, 
my Father recovered much of his spirits and his 
power of work, and the earliest sunshine soothed 
and refreshed us both. I was still almost always 
with him, but we had now some curious com- 
panions. 

The village, at the southern end of which our 
villa stood, was not pretty. It had no rural pict- 
uresqueness of any kind. The only pleasant 
feature of it, the handsome and ancient parish 
church, with its umbrageous churchyard, was 
131 



FATHER AND SON 

then almost entirely concealed by a congeries of 
mean shops, which were ultimately, before the 
close of my childhood, removed. The village 
consisted of two parallel lines of contiguous 
houses, all whitewashed and most of them fronted 
by trifling shop- windows ; for half a mile this street 
ascended to the church, and then it descended 
for another half-mile, ending suddenly in fields, 
the hedges of which displayed, at intervals, the 
inevitable pollard elm-tree. The walk through 
the village, which we seemed to make incessantly, 
was very wearisome to me. I dreaded the rude- 
ness of the children, and there was nothing in the 
shops to amuse me. Walking on the inch or two 
of broken pavement in front of the houses was 
disagreeable and tiresome, and the foetor which 
breathed on close days from the open doors and 
windows made me feel faint. But this walk was 
obhgatory, since the 'TubUc Room," as our Uttle 
chapel was called, lay at the further extremity 
of the dreary street. 

We attended this place of worship immediately 
on our arrival, and my Father, iminvited but 
imresisted, inmaediately assumed the adminis- 
tration of it. It was a square, empty room, 
built, for I know not what purpose, over a stable. 
Anomoniac odours used to rise through the floor 
as we sat there at our long devotions. Before 
132 



FATHER AND SON 

our coining, a little flock of persons met in the 
Room, a community of the indefinite sort just 
then becoming frequent in the West of England, 
pious rustics connected with no other recognised 
body of Christians, and depending directly on 
the independent study of the Bible. They were 
largely women, but there was more than a sprink- 
ling of men, poor, simple and generally sickly. 
In later days, under my Father's ministration, 
the body increased and positively flourished. It 
came to include retired professional men, an ad- 
miral, nay, even the brother of a peer. But in 
those earliest years the ^'brethren" and '' sisters" 
were all of them ordinary peasants. They were 
jobbing gardeners and journeymen carpenters, 
masons and tailors, washerwomen and domestic 
servants. I wish that I could paint, in colours 
so vivid that my readers could perceive what 
their little society consisted of, this quaint col- 
lection of humble, conscientious, ignorant and 
gentle persons. In chronicle or fiction, I have 
never been fortunate enough to meet with any- 
thing which resembled them. The caricatures 
of enmity and worldly scorn are as crude, to 
my memory, as the unction of religious conven- 
tionality is featureless. 

The origin of the meeting had been odd. A 

few years before we came, a crew of Cornish 

133 



FATHER AND SON 

fishermen, quite unknown to the villagers, were 
driven by stress of weather into the haven under 
the diff. They landed, and, instead of going to 
a public-house, they looked about for a room 
where they could hold a prayer-meeting. They 
were devout Wesleyans; they had come from the 
open sea, they were far from home, and they 
had been starved by lack of their customary re- 
ligious privileges. As they stood about in the 
street before their meeting, they challenged the 
respectable girls who came out to stare at them, 
with the question, ''Do you love the Lord Jesus, 
my maid?" Receiving dubious answers, they 
pressed the inhabitants to come in and pray 
with them, which several did. Ann Burmington, 
who long afterwards told me about it, was one 
of those girls, and she repeated that the fisher- 
men said, ''What a dreadful thing it will be, at 
the Last Day, when the Lord says, 'Come, ye 
blessed,' and says it not to you, and then, 'De- 
part, ye cursed,' and you maidens have to depart." 
They were finely-built young men, with black 
beards and shining eyes, and I do not question 
that some flash of sex unconsciously mingled 
with the curious episode, although their behaviour 
was in all respects discreet. It was, perhaps, not 
wholly a coincidence that almost all those par- 
ticular girls remained unmarried to the end of 
134 



FATHER AND SON 

their lives. After two or three days, the fisher- 
men went off to sea again. They prayed and 
sailed away, and the girls, who had not even asked 
their names, never heard of them again. But 
several of the young women were definitely con- 
verted, and they formed the nucleus of our little 
gathering. 

My Father preached, standing at a desk; or 
celebrated the communion in front of a deal 
table, with a white napkin spread over it. Some- 
times the audience was so small, generally so un- 
exhilarating, that he was discouraged, but he 
never flagged in energy and zeal. Only those 
who had given evidence of intelligent acceptance 
of the theory of simple faith in their atonement 
through the Blood of Jesus were admitted to the 
communion, or, as it was called 'Hhe Breaking 
of Bread." It was made a very strong point that 
no one should ''break bread," — unless for good 
reason shown — until he or she had been baptized, 
that is to say, totally immersed, in solemn con- 
clave, by the ministering brother. This rite used, 
in our earhest days, to be performed, with pictu- 
resque simphcity, in the sea on the Oddicombe 
beach, but to this there were, even in those quiet 
years, extreme objections. A jeering crowd could 
scarcely be avoided, and women, in particular, 
shrank from the ordeal. This used to be a practi- 
135 



FATHER AND SON 

cal difficulty, and my Father, when communi- 
cants confessed that they had not yet been bap- 
tized, would shake his head and say gravely, 
''Ah! ah! you shun the Cross of Christ!" But 
that baptism in the sea on the open beach was a 
"cross," he would not deny, and when we built 
our own little chapel, a sort of font, planked over, 
was arranged in the Room itself. 

Among these quiet, taciturn people, there were 
several whom I recall with affection. In this 
remote corner of Devonshire, on the road no- 
whither, they had preserved much of the air of 
that eighteenth century which the elders among 
them perfectly remembered. There was one old 
man, born before the French Revolution, whose 
figure often recurs to me. This was James Peth- 
erbridge, the Nestor of our meeting, extremely 
tall and attenuated; he came on Sundays in a 
full, white smock-frock, smartly embroidered 
down the front, and when he settled himself to 
hsten, he would raise this smock like a skirt, and 
reveal a pair of immensely long thin legs, cased 
in tight leggings, and ending in shoes with buckles. 
As the sacred message fell from my Father's lips, 
the lantern jaws of Mr. Petherbridge slowly fell 
apart, while his knees sloped to so immense a 
distance from one another that it seemed as though 
they never could meet again. He had been pious 
136 



FATHER AND SON 

all his life, and he used to tell us, in some modest 
pride, that when he was a lad, the farmer's wife 
who was his mistress used to say, "I think our 
Jem is going to be a Methody, he do so hanker 
after godly discoursings." Mr. Petherbridge was 
accustomed to pray torally, at our prayer-meet- 
ings, in a funny old voice like wind in a hollow 
tree, and he seldom failed to express a hope that 
''the Lord would support Miss Lafoy" — who was 
the village schoolmistress, and one of om* con- 
gregation, — "in her labour of teaching the young 
idea how to shoot." I, not understanding this 
literary allusion, long beheved the school to be 
addicted to some species of pistol-practice. 

The key of the Room was kept by Richard 
Moxhay, the mason, who was of a generation 
younger than Mr. Petherbridge, but yet "getting 
on in years." Moxhay, I cannot tell why, was 
always dressed in white corduroy, on which any 
stain of Devonshire scarlet mud was painfully 
conspicuous; when he was smartened up, his ap- 
pearance suggested that somebody had given him 
a coating of that rich Western whitewash which 
looks like Devonshire cream. His locks were 
long and sparse, and as deadly black as his clothes 
were white. He was a modest, gentle man, with 
a wife even more meek and gracious than him- 
self. They never, to my recollection, spoke un- 
137 



FATHER AND SON 

less they were spoken to, and their melancholy 
impassiveness used to vex my Father, who once, 
referring to the Moxhays, described them, sen- 
tentiously but justly, as being ''laborious, but 
it would be an exaggeration to say happy, Chris- 
tians." Indeed, my memory pictures almost all 
the ''saints" of that early time as sad and humble 
souls, lacking vitality, yet not complaining of 
anything definite. A quite surprising number 
of them, it is true, male and female, suffered from 
different forms of consumption, so that the Room 
rang in winter evenings with a discord of hack- 
ing coughs. But it seems to me that, when I was 
quite young, half the inhabitants of our rural 
district were affected with phthisis. No doubt, 
our peculiar religious community was more likely 
to attract the feeble members of a population, 
than to tempt the flush and the fair. 

Miss Marks, patient pilgrim that she was, ac- 
cepted this quaint society without a murmur, 
although I do not think it was much to her taste. 
But in a veiy short time it was sweetened to her 
by the formation of a devoted and romantic 
friendship for one of the "sisters," who was, in- 
deed, if my childish recollection does not fail me, 
a very charming person. The consequence of 
this enthusiastic alliance was that I was carried 
into the bosom of the family to which Miss Marks' 
138 



FATHER AND SON 

new friend belonged, and of these excellent people 
I must give what picture I can. Almost op- 
posite the Room, therefore at the far end of the 
village, across one of the rare small gardens, (in 
which tliis first winter I discovered with rapture the 
magenta stars of a new flower, hepatica) — a shop- 
window displayed a thin row of plates and dishes, 
cups and saucers; above it was painted the name 
of Burmington. This china-shop was the prop- 
erty of three orphan sisters; Ann, Mary Grace, 
and Bess, the latter lately married to a carpenter, 
who was ''elder" at our meeting; the other two, 
resolute old maids. Ann, whom I have already 
mentioned, had been one of the girls converted 
by the Cornish fishermen. She was about ten 
years older than Bess, and Mary Grace came half- 
way between them. Ann was a very worthy 
woman, but masterful and passionate, suffering 
from an ungovernable temper, which, at calmer 
moments she used to refer to, not without com- 
placency, as "the sin which doth most easily be- 
set me." Bess was insignificant, and vulgarised 
by domestic cares. But Mary Grace was a de- 
lightful creature. 

The Burmingtons lived in what was almost the 

only old house surviving in the village. It was 

an extraordinary construction of two storeys, 

with vast rooms, and winding passages, and sur- 

139 



FATHER AND SON 

prising changes of level. The sisters were poor, 
but very industrious, and never in anything like 
want ; they sold, as I have said, crockery, and they 
took in washing, and did a Uttle fine needlework, 
and sold the produce of a great, vague garden at 
the back. In process of time, the elder sisters 
took a young woman, whose name was Drusilla 
Elliott, to live with them as servant and com- 
panion; she was a converted person, worshipping 
with a kindred sect, the Bible Christians. I re- 
member being much interested in hearing how 
Bess, before her marriage, became converted. 
Mary Grace, on account of her infirm health, 
slept alone in one room; in another, of vast size, 
stood a family four-poster, where Ann slept with 
Drusilla Elliott, and another bed in the same 
room took Bess. The sisters and their friend had 
been constantly praying that Bess might ''find 
peace," for she was still a stranger to salvation. 
One night, she suddenly called out, rather crossly, 
''What are you two whispering about? Do go 
to sleep," to which Ann repUed: "We are praying 
for you." "How do you know," answered Bess, 
"that I don't believe?" And then she told them 
that, that very night, when she was sitting in the 
shop, she had closed with God's offer of redemp- 
tion. Late in the night as it was, Ann and Dru- 
silla could do no less than go in and waken Mary 
140 



FATHER AND SON 

Grace, whom however, they found awake, pray- 
ing, she too, for the conversion of Bess. They 
told her the good news, and all four, kneeling in 
the darkness, gave thanks aloud to God for his 
infinite mercy. 

It was Mary Grace Burmington who now be- 
came the romantic friend of Miss Marks, and a 
sort of second benevolence to me. She must 
have been under thirty years of age i she was very 
small, and she was distressingly deformed in the 
spine, but she had an animated, almost a spar- 
khng countenance. When we first arrived in the 
village, Mary Grace was only just recovering from 
a gastric fever which had taken her close to the 
grave. I remember hearing that the vicar, a 
stout and pompous man at whom we always 
glared defiance, went, in Mary Grace's supposed 
extremity, to the Burmington 's shop-door, and 
shouted: 'Teace be to this house," intending to 
offer his ministrations, but that Ann, who was in 
one of her tantrums, positively hounded him from 
the doorstep and down the garden, in her passion- 
ate nonconformity. Mary Grace, however, re- 
covered, and soon became, not merely Miss 
Marks' inseparable friend, but my Father's spir- 
itual factotum. He found it irksome to visit 
the ''Saints" from house to house, and Mary 
Grace Burmington gladly assumed this labour. 
141 



FATHER AND SON 

She proved a most efficient coadjutor: searched 
out, cherished and confirmed any of those, es- 
pecially the young, who were attracted by my 
Father's preaching, and for several years was a 
great joy and comfort to us all. Even when her 
illness so increased that she could no longer rise 
from her bed, she was a centre of usefulness and 
cheerfulness from that retreat, where she "re- 
ceived," in a kind of rustic state, under a patch- 
work coverlid that was like a basket of flowers. 

My Father, ever reflecting on what could be 
done to confirm my spiritual vocation, to pin me 
down, as it were, beyond any possibihty of es- 
cape, bethought j him that it would accustom me 
to what he calfed "pastoral work in the Lord's 
service," if I accompanied Mary Grace on her 
visits from house to house. If it is remem- 
bered that I was only eight and a half when this 
scheme was carried into practice, it will surprise 
no one to hear that it was not crowned with suc- 
cess. I disliked extremely tliis visitation of the 
poor. I felt shy, I had nothing to say, with diffi- 
culty could I understand their soft Devonian 
patois, and most of all — a signal perhaps of my 
neurotic condition — I dreaded and loathed the 
smells of their cottages. One had to run over 
the whole gamut of odours, some so faint that they 
embraced the nostril with a fairy kiss, others 
142 



FATHER AND SON 

bluntly gross, of the "knock-you-down" order; 
some sweet, with a dreadful sourness, some bitter, 
with a smack of rancid hair-oil. There were fine 
manly smells of the pigsty and the open drain, 
and these prided themselves on being all they 
seemed to be ; but there were also feminine odours, 
masquerading as you knew not what, in which 
penny whiffs, vials of balm and opoponax, seemed 
to have become tainted, vaguely, with the residue 
of the slop-pail. It was not, I think, that the 
villagers were particularly dirty, but those were 
days before the invention of sanitary science, and 
my poor young nose was morbidly, nay ridicu- 
lously, sensitive. I often came home from '^ visit- 
ing the saints" absolutely incapable of eating 
the milk-sop, with brown sugar strewn over it, 
which was my evening meal. 

There was one exception to my unwillingness 
to join in the pastoral labours of Mary Grace. 
When she announced, on a fine afternoon, that 
we were going to Pavor and Barton, I was always 
agog to start. These were two hamlets in our 
parish and, I should suppose, the original home 
of its population. Pavor was, even then, decayed 
almost to extinction, but Barton preserved its 
desultory street of ancient, detached cottages. 
Each, however poor, had a wild garden round it, 
and, where the inhabitants possessed some pride 
143 



FATHER AND SON 

in their surroundings, the roses and the jasmines 
and that distinguished creeper, — which one sees 
nowhere at its best, but in Devonshire cottage- 
gardens, — the stately cotoniaster, made the whole 
place a bower. Barton was in vivid contrast to 
our own harsh, open, squahd village, with its 
mean modem houses, its absence of all vegeta- 
tion. The ancient thatched cottages of Barton 
were shut in by moist hills, and canopied by 
ancient trees; they were approached along a deep 
lane which was all a wonder and a revelation to 
me that spring, since, in the very words of Shelley: 

There in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine, 

Green cow-bind and the moonlight-coloured May, 

And cherry blossoms, and white cups, whose wine 
Was the bright dew yet drained not by the day; 

And wild roses, and ivy serpentine 

With its dark buds and leaves- wandering astray. 

Around and beyond Barton there lay fairyland. 

All was mysterious, unexplored, rich with infinite 
possibihties. I should one day enter it, the sword 
of make-beheve in my hand, the cap of courage 
on my head, ''when you are a big boy." said 
the oracle of Mary Grace. For the present, we 
had to content ourselves with being an unad- 
venturous couple — a little woman, bent half 
double, and a preternaturally sedate small boy 
— as we walked very slowly, side by side, con- 
144 



FATHER AND SON 

versing on terms of high familiarity, in which 
Bibhcal and colloquial phrases were quaintly 
jumbled, through the sticky red mud of the Pavor 
lanes with Barton as a bourne before us. 

When we came home, my Father would some- 
times ask me for particulars. Where had we 
been, whom had we found at home, what testi- 
mony had those visited been able to give of the 
Lord's goodness to them, what had Mary Grace 
rephed in the way of exhortation, reproof or 
condolence? These questions I hated at the time, 
but they were very useful to me, since they gave 
me the habit of concentrating my attention on 
what was going on in the course of our visits, in 
case I might be called upon to give a report. 
My Father was very kind in the matter; he culti- 
vated my powers of expression, he did not snub 
me when I failed to be intelligent. But I over- 
heard Miss Marks and Mary Grace discussing the 
whole question under the guise of referring to 
"you know whom, not a hundred miles hence," 
fancying that I could not recognise their Uttle 
ostrich because its head was in a bag of metaphor. 
I imderstood perfectly, and gathered that they 
both of them thought this business of my going 
into undrained cottages injudicious. According- 
ly, I was by degrees taken ''visiting" only when 
Mary Grace was going into the country-hamlets, 
145 



FATHER AND SON 

and then I was usually left outside, to skip among 
the flowers and stalk the butterflies. 

I must not, however, underestimate the very 
prominent part taken all through this spring and 
summer of 1858 by the collection of specimens 
on the sea-shore. My Father had returned, the 
chagrin of his failure in theorizing now being miti- 
gated, to what was his real work in life, the practi- 
cal study of animal forms in detail. He was not 
a biologist, in the true sense of the term. That 
luminous indication which Flaubert gives of 
what the action of the scientiflc mind should be, 
''affranchissant Tesprit et pesant les mondes, sans 
haine, sans peur, sans piti4, sans amour et sans 
Dieu," was opposed in every segment to the 
attitude of my Father, who, nevertheless, was a 
man of very high scientific attainment. But, 
again I repeat, he was not a philosopher; he was 
incapable, by temperament and education, of 
forming broad generahsations and of escaping in 
a vast survey from the troublesome pettiness of 
detail. He saw everything through a lens, noth- 
ing in the immensity of natm-e. Certain senses 
were absent in him; I think that, with all his 
justice, he had no conception of the importance 
of liberty ; with all his intelligence, the bomidaries 
of the atmosphere in which his mind could think 
at all were always close about him; with all his 
146 



FATHER AND SON 

faith in the Word of God, he had no confidence 
in the Divine Benevolence ; and with all his pas- 
sionate piety, he habitually mistook fear for love. 

It was down on the shore, tramping along the 
pebbled terraces of the beach, clambering over 
the great blocks of fallen conglomerate which 
broke the white curve with rufous promontories 
that jutted into the sea, or, finally, bending over 
those shallow tidal pools in the limestone rocks 
which were our proper hunting-ground, — it was in 
such circumstances as these that my Father be- 
came most easy, most happy, most human. That 
hard look across his brows, which it wearied me 
to see, the look that came from sleepless anxiety 
of conscience, faded away, and left the dark 
countenance still always stern indeed, but serene 
and miupbraiding. Those pools were our mir- 
rors, in which, reflected in the dark hyaline and 
framed by the sleek and shining fronds of oar- 
weed, there used to appear the shapes of a mid- 
dle-aged man and a funny Httle boy, equally 
eager, and, I almost find the presumption to say, 
equally well prepared for business. 

If any one goes down to those shores now, if 
man or boy seeks to follow in om- traces, let him 
realise at once, before he takes the trouble to roll 
up his sleeves, that his zeal will end in labour 
lost. There- is nothing, now, where in our days 
147 



FATHER AND SON 

there was so much. Then the rocks between tide 
and tide were submarine gardens of a beauty that 
seemed often to be fabulous, and was positively 
delusive, since, if we delicately lifted the weed- 
curtains of a windless pool, though we might for a 
moment see its sides and floor paved with living 
blossoms, ivory-white, rosy-red, orange and am- 
ethyst, yet all that panoply would melt away, 
furled into the hollow rock, if we so much as 
dropped a pebble in to disturb the magic dream. 
Half a centmy ago, in many parts of the coast 
of Devonshire and Cornwall, where the limestone 
at the water's edge is wrought into crevices and 
hollows, the tide-line was, like Keats' Grecian 
vase, "fx still unravished bride of quietness." 
These cups and basins were always full, whether 
the tide was high or low, and the only way in 
which they were affected was that twice in the 
twenty-four hours they were replenished by cold 
streams from the great sea, and then twice were 
left brimming to be vivified by the temperate 
movement of the upper air. They were hving 
flower-beds, so exquisite in their perfection, that 
my Father, in spite of his scientific requirements, 
used not seldom to pause before he began to rifle 
them, ejaculating that it was indeed a pity to 
disturb such congregated beauty. The antiquity 
of these rock-pools, and the infinite succession of 
148 



FATHER AND SON 

the soft and radiant forms, sea-anemones, sea- 
weeds, shells, fishes, which had inhabited them, 
undistm*bed since the creation of the world, used 
to occupy my Father's fancy. We burst in, he 
used to say, where no one had ever thought of 
intruding before ; and if the Garden of Eden had 
been situate in Devonshire, Adam and Eve, step- 
ping hghtly down to bathe in the rainbow- 
coloured spray, would have seen the identical 
sights that we now saw, — the great prawns gliding 
like transparent launches, anthea waving in the 
twihght its thick white waxen tentacles, and the 
fronds of the dulse faintly streaming on the water, 
like huge red banners in some reverted atmos- 
phere. 

All this is long over, and done with. The ring 
of living beauty drawn about our shores was a 
very thin and fragile one. It had existed all 
those centuries solely in consequence of the in- 
difference, the blissful ignorance of man. These 
rock-basins, fringed by coralhnes, filled with still 
water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, 
thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life, — 
they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and 
emptied, and vulgarised. An army of '^collect- 
ors" has passed over them, and ravaged every 
corner of them. The fairy paradise has been vio- 
lated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural 
149 



FATHER AND SON 

selection has been crushed under the rough paw 
of well-meaning, idle-minded curiosity. That my 
Father, himself so reverent, so conservative, had 
by the popularity of his books acquired the direct 
responsibility for a calamity that he had never 
anticipated, became clear enough to himself be- 
fore many years had passed, and cost him great 
chagrin. No one will see again on the shore of 
England what I saw in my early childhood, the 
submarine vision of dark rocks, speckled and 
starred with an infinite variety of colour, and 
streamed over by silken flags of royal crimson and 
purple. 

In reviving these impressions, I am unable to 
give any exact chronological sequence to them. 
These particular adventures began early in 1858, 
they reached their greatest intensity in the sum- 
mer of 1859, and they did not altogether cease, 
so far as my Father was concerned, until nearly 
twenty years later. But it was while he was 
composing what, as I am told by scientific men 
of to-day, continues to be his most valuable con- 
tribution to knowledge, his ''History of the Brit- 
ish Sea- Anemones and Corals," that we worked 
together on the shore for a definite purpose, and 
the last installment of that still-classic volume was 
ready for press by the close of 1859. 

The way in which my Father worked, in his 
150 



FATHER AND SON 

most desperate escapades, was to wade breast-high 
into one of the huge pools, and examine the worm- 
eaten sm'face of the rock above and below the brim. 
In such remote places — spots where I could never 
venture, being left, a slightly timorous Androm- 
eda, chained to a safer level of the cliff — in these 
extreme basins, there used often to Im-k a mar- 
vellous profusion of animal and vegetable forms. 
My Father would search for the roughest and 
most corroded points of rock, those offering the 
best refuge for a variety of creatures, and would 
then chisel off fragments as low down in the water 
as he could. These pieces of rock were instantly 
plunged in the salt water of jars which we had 
brought with us for the purpose. When as 
much had been collected as we could carry away 
— my Father always dragged about an immense 
square basket, the creak of whose handles I can 
still fancy that I hear — we turned to trudge up 
the long climb home. Then all our prizes were 
spread out, face upward, in shallow pans of clean 
sea-water. 

In a few hours, when all dirt had subsided, and 
what hving creatures we had brought seemed to 
have recovered their composure, my work began. 
My eyes were extremely keen and powerful, 
though they were vexatiously near-sighted. Of no 
use in examining objects at any distance, in inves- 
151 



FATHER AND SON 

tigating a minute surface my vision was trained to 
be invaluable. The shallow pan, with our spoils, 
would rest on a table near the window, and I, 
kneeling on a chair opposite the light, would 
lean over the surface till everything was within 
an inch or two of my eyes. Often I bent, in my 
zeal, so far forward that the water touched the 
tip of my nose and gave me a httle icy shock. In 
this attitude — an idle spectator might have 
formed the impression that I was trying to wash 
my head and could not quite summon up resolu- 
tion enough to plunge — in this odd pose I would 
remain for a long time, holding my breath, and 
examining with extreme care every atom of rock, 
every swirl of detritus. This was a task which 
my Father could only perform by the help of a 
lens, with which, of course, he took care to sup- 
plement my examination. But that my surve}^ 
was of use, he has himself most handsomely testi- 
fied in his ''Actinologia Britannica," where he ex- 
presses his debt to the ^^keen and well-practised 
eye of my little son." Nor, if boasting is not to 
be excluded, is it every eminent biologist, every 
proud and masterful F.R.S., who can lay his hand 
on his heart and swear that, before reaching the 
age of ten years, he had added, not merely a new 
species, but a new genus to the British fauna. 
That, however, the author of these pages can do, 
152 



FATHER AND SON 

who on June 29, 1859, discovered a tiny atom, — 
and ran in the greatest agitation to announce the 
discovery of that object ''as a form with which he 
was unacquainted," — which figures since then on 
all lists of sea-anemones as phellia murocincta, or 
the walled corklet. Alas! that so fair a swallow 
should have made no biological summer in after- 
life. 

These dehcious agitations by the edge of the 
salt sea wave must have greatly improved my 
health, which however was still looked upon as 
fragile. I was loaded with coats and comforters, 
and strolled out between Miss Marks and Mary 
Grace Burmington, a muffled ball of flannel. This 
alone was enough to give me a look of delicacy, 
which the ''saints," in their blunt way, made no 
scruple of commenting upon to my face. I was 
greatly impressed by a conversation held over my 
bed one evening by the servants. Our cook, 
Susan, a person of enormous size, and Kate, the 
tattling, tiresome parlour-maid who waited upon 
us, on the summer evening I speak of were 
standing — I cannot teU why — on each side of my 
bed. I shut my eyes, and lay quite still, in order 
to escape conversing with them, and they spoke 
to one another. "Ah, poor lamb," Kate said 
trivially, "he's not long for this world; going 
home to Jesus, he is, — in a jiffy, I should say by 
153 



FATHER AND SON 

the look of 'un." But Susan answered: ''Not so. 
I dreamed about 'un, and I know for sure that he 
is to be spared for missionary service." ''Mis- 
sionary service?" repeated Kate, impressed. 
"Yes," Susan went on, with solemn emphasis, 
"he'll bleed for his Lord in heathen parts, that's 
what the future have in store for 'm." When 
they were gone, I beat upon the coverlid with my 
fists, and I determined that whatever happened, 
I would not, not, not, go out to preach the Gospel 
among horrid, tropical niggers. 



154 



CHAPTER VII 

In the history of an infancy so cloistered and 
uniform as mine, such a real adventure as my 
being pubhcly and successfully kidnapped cannot 
be overlooked. There were several ''innocents'^ 
in our village, harmless eccentrics who had more 
or less unquestionably crossed the barrier which 
divides the sane from the insane. They were not 
discouraged by pubHc opinion ; indeed, several of 
them were favoured beings, suspected by my 
Father of exaggerating their mental density in 
order to escape having to work, like dogs, who, 
as we all know, could speak as well as we do, 
were they not afraid of being made to fetch and 
carry. Miss Mary Flaw was not one of these im- 
beciles. She was what the French call a de- 
traquee; she had enjoyed a good intelhgence and 
an active mind, but her wits had left the rails 
and were careering about the country. Miss 
Flaw was the daughter of a retired Baptist min- 
ister, and she lived, with I remember not what 
155 



FATHER AND SON 

relations, in a little solitary house high up at 
Barton Cross, whither Mary Grace and I would 
sometimes struggle when our pastoral duties were 
over. In later years, when I met with those 
celebrated verses in which the philosopher ex- 
presses the hope 



In the downhill of life, when I find I'm declining, 

May my lot no less fortunate be 
Than a snug elbow-chair can afford for reclining, 

And a cot that o'erlooks the wide sea, 



my thoughts returned instinctively, and they still 
return, to the high abode of Miss Flaw. There 
was a porch at her door, both for shelter and 
shade, and it was covered with jasmine; but the 
charm of the place was a summer-house close by, 
containing a table, encrusted with cowry-shells, 
and seats from which one saw the distant waters of 
the bay. At the entrance to this grot there was 
always set a ''snug elbow-chair," destined, I sup- 
pose, for the Rev. Mr. Flaw, or else left there in 
pious memory of him, since I cannot recollect 
whether he was aUve or dead. 

I delighted in these visits to Mary Flaw. She 
always received us with effusion, tripping forward 
to meet us, and leading us, each by a hand held high, 
with a dancing movement which I thought infinitely 
graceful, to the cowry-shell bower, where she would 
156 



FATHER AND SON 

regale us with Devonshire cream and with small 
hard biscuits that were hke pebbles. The conver- 
sation of Mary Flaw was a great treat to me. I en- 
joyed its irregularities, its waywardness ; it was like 
a tune that wandered into several keys. As Mary 
Grace Burmington put it, one never knew what 
dear Mary Flaw would say next, and that she did 
not herself know added 'to the charm. She had 
become crazed, poor thing, in consequence of a 
disappointment in love, but of course I did not 
know that, nor that she was crazed at all. I 
thought her brilliant and original, and I liked her 
very much. In the light of coming events, it 
would be affectation were I to pretend that she 
did not feel a similar partiality for me. 

Miss Flaw was from the first devoted to my 
Father's ministrations, and it was part of our odd 
village indulgence that no one ever dreamed of 
preventing her from coming to the Room. On 
Sunday evenings the bulk of the audience was 
arranged on forms, with backs to them, set in the 
middle of the floor, with a passage round them, 
while other forms were placed against the walls. 
My Father preached from a lectern, facing the au- 
dience. If darkness came on in the course of the 
service Richard Moxhay, glimmering in his cream- 
white corduroys, used to go slowly round, lighting 
groups of tallow candles by the help of a box of 
157 



FATHER AND SON 

lucifers. Mary Flaw always assumed the place of 
honour, on the left extremity of the front bench, 
immediately opposite my Father. Miss Marks 
and Mary Grace, with me ensconced and almost 
buried between them, occupied the right of the 
same bench. While the lighting proceeded, Miss 
Flaw used to direct it from her seat, silently by 
pointing out to Moxhay, who took no notice, what 
groups of candles he should light next. She did 
this just as the clown in the circus directs the 
grooms how to move the furniture, and Moxhay 
paid no more attention to her than the grooms do 
to the clown. Miss Flaw had another peculiarity : 
she silently went through a service exactly similar 
to ours, but much briefer. The course of our even- 
ing service was this. My Father prayed, and we all 
knelt down; then he gave out a hynrn, and most 
of us stood up to sing; then he preached for 
about an hour, while we sat and listened; then a 
hymn again, then prayer and the valediction. 

Mary Flaw went through this ritual, but on a 
smaller scale. We all knelt down together, but 
when we rose from our knees. Miss Flaw was al- 
ready standing up, and was pretending, without 
a sound, to sing a hymn ; in the midst of our hymn, 
she sat down, opened her Bible, found a text, 
and then leaned back, her eyes fixed in space, 
Ustening to an imaginary sermon, which our own 
158 



FATHER AND SON 

real one soon caught up, and coincided with for 
about three-quarters of an hour. Then, while our 
sermon went peacefully on. Miss Flaw would rise, 
and sing in silence (if I am permitted to use such 
an expression) her own visionary hymn ; then she 
would kneel down and pray, then rise, collect her 
belongings, and sweep, in fairy majesty, out of 
the chapel, my Father still rounding his periods 
from the pulpit. Nobody ever thought of pre- 
venting these movements, or of checking the poor 
creature in her innocent flightiness, until the 
evening of the great event. 

It was all my own fault. Mary Flaw had 
finished her imaginary service earher than usual. 
She had stood up alone with her hymn-book 
before her; she had flung herself on her knees 
alone, in the attitude of devotion; she had 
risen ; she had seated herself for a moment to put 
on her gloves, and to collect her Bible, her hymn- 
book and her pocket-handkerchief in her reticule. 
She was ready to start, and she looked around 
her with a pleasant air; my Father, all undis- 
turbed, booming away meanwhile over our heads. 
I know not why the manoeuvres of Miss Flaw 
especially attracted me that evening, but I 
leaned out across Miss Marks and I caught Miss 
Flaw's eye. She nodded, I nodded; and the 
amazing deed was done, I hardly know how. 
159 



FATHER AND SON 

Miss Flaw, with incredible swiftness, flew along 
the line, plucked me by the coat-collar from 
between my paralysed protectresses, darted with 
me down the chapel and out into the dark, before 
any one had time to say "Jack Robinson." 

My Father gazed from the pulpit and the stream 
of exhortation withered on his hps. No one 
in the body of the audience stirred; no one 
but himself had clearly seen what had happened. 
Vague rows of ''saints" with gaping countenances 
stared up at him, while he shouted, ''Will nobody 
stop them?" as we whisked out through the 
doorway. Forth into the moist night we went, 
and up the lampless village, where, a few minutes 
later, the swiftest of the congregation, with my 
Father at their head, found us sitting on the 
door-step of the butcher's shop. My captor was 
now quite quiet, and made no objection to my 
quitting her, — "without a single kiss or a good- 
bye," as the poet says. 

Although I had scarcely felt frightened at the 
time, doubtless my nerves were shaken by this 
escapade, and it may have had something to 
do with the reciirrence of the distressing visions 
from which I had suffered as a very Httle child. 
These came back, with a force and expansion 
due to my increased maturity. I had hardly 
laid my head down on the pillow, than, as it 
160 



FATHER AND SON 

seemed to me, I was taking part in a mad gallop 
through space. Some force, which had tight 
hold of me, so that I felt myself an atom in its 
grasp, was hm'rying me on, over an endless 
slender bridge, mider which on either side a loud 
torrent rushed at a vertiginous depth below. 
At first our helpless flight, — for I was bound hand 
and foot like Mazeppa, — proceeded in a straight 
hne, but presently it began to curve, and we 
raced and roared along, in what gradually be- 
came a monstrous vortex, reverberant with noises, 
loud with light, while, as we proceeded, enormous 
concentric circles engulfed us, and wheeled above 
and about us. It seemed as if we, — I, that is, 
and the undefined force which carried me, — 
were pushing feverishly on towards a goal which 
our whole concentrated energies were bent on 
reaching, but which a frenzied despair in my 
heart told me we never could reach, yet the 
attainment of which alone could save us from 
destruction. Far away, in the pulsation of the 
great luminous whorls, I could just see that goal, 
a ruby-coloured point waxing and waning, and 
it bore, or to be exact it consisted of, the letters 
of the word Carmine. 

This agitating vision recurred night after 
night, and filled me with inexpressible distress. 
The details of it altered very little, and I knew 
161 



FATHER AND SON 

what I had to expect when I crept into bed. 
I knew that for a few minutes I should be batthng 
with the chill of the linen sheets, and trying to 
keep awake, but that then, without a pause, 
I should slip into that terrible realm of storm 
and stress in which I was bound hand and foot, 
and sent galloping through infinit3^ Often have 
I wakened, with unutterable joy, to find my 
Father and Miss Marks, whom my screams had 
disturbed, standing one on each side of my 
bed. They could release me from my nightmare, 
which seldom assailed me twice a night, but 
how to preserve me from its original attack 
passed their understanding. My Father, in his 
tenderness, thought to exorcise the demon by 
prayer. He would appear in the bed-room, just 
as I was first slipping into bed, and he would 
kneel at my side. The hght from a candle on the 
mantle-shelf streamed down upon his dark head 
of hair while his face was buried in the coverlid, 
from which a loud voice came up, a little muffled, 
begging that I might be preserved against all 
the evil spirits that walk in darkness, and that 
the deep might not swallow me up. 

This little ceremony gave a distraction to my 

thoughts, and may have been useful in that 

way. But it led to an unfortunate circumstance. 

My Father began to enjoy these orisons at my 

162 



FATHER AND SON 

bed-side, and to prolong them. Perhaps they 
lasted a Httle too long, but I contrived to keep 
awake through them, sometimes by a great 
effort. On one unhappy night, however, I gave 
even worse offence than slumber would have 
given. My Father was praying aloud, in the 
attitude I have described, and I was half sitting, 
half lying in bed, with the clothes sloping from 
my chin. Suddenly a rather large insect, dark 
and flat, with more legs than a self-respecting 
insect ought to need, appeared at the bottom 
of the coimterpane, and slowly advanced. I 
think it was nothing worse than a beetle. It 
walked successfully past my Father's sleek 
black ball of a head, and climbed straight up at 
me, nearer, nearer, till it seemed all a twinkle of 
horns and joints. I bore it in silent fascination 
till it almost tickled my chin, and then I screamed 
'Tapa! Papa!" My Father rose in great dud- 
geon, removed the insect (what were insects to 
him!) and then gave me a tremendous lecture. 

The sense of desperation which this incident 
produced I shall not easily forget. Life seemed 
really to be very harassing when to visions 
within and beetles without there was joined the 
consciousness of having grievously offended God 
by an act of disrespect. It is difficult for me 
to justify to myself the violent jobation which 
163 



FATHER AND SON 

my Father gave me in consequence of my screams, 
except by attributing to him something of the 
human weakness of vanity. I cannot help 
thinking that he liked to hear himself speak 
to God in the presence of an admiring listener. 
He prayed with fervour and animation, in pure 
Johnsonian Enghsh, and I hope I am not un- 
dutiful if I add my impression that he was not 
displeased with the sound of his own devotions. 
My cry for help had needlessly, as he thought, 
broken in upon this holy and seemly perform- 
ance. ''You, the child of a naturalist," he 
remarked in awesome tones, "you to pretend 
to feel terror at the advance of an insect?" It 
could but be a pretext, he declared, for avoid- 
ing the testimony of faith in prayer. ''If your 
heart were fixed, if it panted after the Lord, 
it would take more than the movements of a 
beetle to make you disturb oral supplication 
at His footstool. Beware! for God is a jealous 
God and He consumes them in wrath who make 
a noise like a dog." 

My Father took at all times a singular pleas- 
ure in repeating that "om- God is a jealous 
God." He liked the word, which I suppose 
he used in an antiquated sense. He was accus- 
tomed to tell the "saints" at the room, — in a 
very genial manner, and smiling at them as he 
164 



FATHER AND SON 

said it, — "I am jealous over you, my beloved 
brothers and sisters, with a godly jealousy." I 
know that this was interpreted by some of the 
saints, — for I heard Mary Grace say so to Miss 
Marks, — as meaning that my Father was re- 
sentful because some of them attended the 
services at the Wesleyan chapel on Thursday 
evenings. But my Father was utterly incap- 
able of such Httleness as this, and when he talked 
of '^jealousy" he meant a lofty solicitude, a 
careful watchfulness. He meant that their spirit- 
ual honour was a matter of anxiety to him. No 
doubt when he used to tell me to remember that 
our God is a jealous God, he meant that my 
sins and short-comings were not matters of in- 
difference to the Divine Being. But I think, 
looking back, that it was very extraordinary for 
a man, so instructed and so inteUigent as he, to 
dwell so much on the possible anger of the Lord, 
rather than on his pity and love. The theory of 
extreme Puritanism can surely offer no quainter 
example of its fallacy than this idea that the 
omnipotent Jehovah could be seriously offended, 
and could stoop to revenge, because a Uttle, 
nervous child of nine had disturbed a prayer by 
being frightened at an insect. 

The fact that the word ''carmine" appeared 
as the goal of my visionary pursuits is not so 
165 



FATHER AND SON 

inexplicable as it may seem. My Father was 
at this time producing numerous water-colour 
drawings of minute and even of microscopic 
forms of Hfe. These he executed in the manner 
of miniature, with an amazing fidelity of form 
and with a brilliancy of colour which remains 
unfaded after fifty years. By far the most 
costly of his pigments was the intense crimson 
which is manufactured out of the very spirit 
and essence of cochineal. I had lately become 
a fervent imitator of his works of art, and I 
was allowed to use all of his colours, except 
one; I was strictly forbidden to let a hair of 
my paint-brush touch the little broken mass of 
carmine which was all that he possessed. We 
believed, but I do not know whether this could 
be the fact, that carmine of this superlative 
quality was sold at a guinea a cake. '^ Carmine," 
therefore, became my shibboleth of self-indul- 
gence; it was a symbol of all that taste and 
art and wealth could combine to produce. I 
imagined, for instance, that at Belshazzar's 
feast, the loftiest epergne of gold, surround- 
ed by flowers and jewels, carried the monarch's 
proudest possession, a cake of carmine. I knew 
of no object in the world of luxury more 
desirable than this, and its obsession in my wak- 
ing hours is quite enough, I think, to account for 
166 



FATHER AND SON 

''caraiine" having been the torment of my 
dreams. 

The httle incident of the beetle displays my 
Father's mood at this period in its worst hght. 
His severity was not very creditable, perhaps, 
to his good sense, but without a word of explana- 
tion it may seem even more imreasonable than 
it was. My Father might have been less stern 
to my lapses from high conduct, and my own 
mind at the same time less armoured against 
his arrows, if our relations had been those which 
exist in an ordinary rehgious family. He would 
have been more indulgent, and my own affections 
might nevertheless have been more easily ahen- 
ated, if I had been treated by him as a common- 
place child, standing as yet outside the pale of 
conscious Christianity. But he had formed the 
idea, and cultivated it assiduously, that I was an 
ame d^ elite, a being to whom the mysteries of 
salvation had been divinely revealed and by 
whom they had been accepted. I was, to his 
partial fancy, one in whom the Holy Ghost 
had already performed a real and permanent 
work. Hence, I was inside the pale; I had 
attained that inner position which divided, as 
we used to say, the Sheep from the Goats. 
Another little boy might be very well-behaved, 
but if he had not consciously "laid hold on 
167 



FATHER AND SON 

Christ," his good deeds, so far, were absolutely 
useless. Whereas I might be a very naughty 
boy, and require much chastisement from God 
and man, but nothing — so my Father thought 
— could invahdate my election, and sooner or 
later, perhaps even after many stripes, I must 
inevitably be brought back to a state of grace. 
The paradox between this unquestionable 
sanctification by faith and my equally unques- 
tionable naughtiness, occupied my Father greatly 
at this time. He made it a frequent subject 
of intercession at family prayers, not caring to 
hide from the servants misdemeanours of mine, 
which he spread out with a melancholy unction 
before the Lord. He cultivated the behef that 
all my httle ailments, all my aches and pains, 
were sent to correct my faults. He carried this 
persuasion very far, even putting this exhortation 
before, instead of after, an instant relief of my 
sufferings. If I burned my fingers with a sulphur 
match, or pinched the end of my nose in the 
door (to mention but two sorrows that recur 
to my memory), my Father would solenmly 
ejaculate: ''0 may these afflictions be much 
sanctified to him!" before offering any remedy 
for my pain. So that I almost longed, under 
the pressure of these pangs, to be a godless 
child, who had never known the privileges of 
168 



FATHER AND SON 

saving .grace, since I argued that such a child 
would be subjected to none of the sufferings 
which seemed to assail my path. 

What the ideas or conduct of ''another child" 
might be I had, however, at this time no idea, 
for, strange as it may sound, I had not, until my 
tenth year was far advanced, made acquaintance 
with any such creature. The ''saints" had chil- 
dren, but I was not called upon to cultivate 
their company, and I had not the shghtest wish 
to do so. But early in 1859 I was allowed, at 
last, to associate with a child of my own age. I 
do not recall that this permission gave me any 
rapture; I accepted it philosophically, but with- 
out that deUghted eagerness which I might have 
been expected to show. My earliest companion, 
then, was a httle boy of almost exactly my own 
age. His name was Benny, which no doubt was 
short for Benjamin. His surname I have for- 
gotten, but his mother — I think he had no father 
— was a solemn and shadowy lady of means who 
Hved in a villa, which was older and much larger 
than ours, on the opposite side of the road. 
Going to "play with Benny" involved a small 
pubhc excursion, and this I was now allowed 
to make by myself — an immense source of self- 
respect. 

Everything in my little memories seems to 
169 



FATHER AND SON 

run askew; obviously I ought to have been 
extremely stirred and broadened by this earliest 
association with a boy of my own age! Yet 
I cannot truly say that it was so. Benny's 
mother possessed what seemed to me a vast 
domain, with lawns winding among broad shrub- 
beries, and a kitchen-garden, with aged fruit- 
trees in it. The ripeness of this place, mossed 
and leafy, was gratifying to my senses, on which 
the rawness of our own bald garden jarred. 
There was an old brick wall between the two 
divisions, upon which it was possible for us to 
climb up, and from this we gained Pisgah-views 
which were a prodigious pleasm*e. But I had 
not the faintest idea how to ''play"; I had 
never learned, had never heard of any "games." 
I think Benny must have lacked initiative almost 
as much as I did. We walked about, and shook 
the bushes, and climbed along the wall; I think 
that was almost all we ever did do. And, sadly 
enough, I cannot recover a phrase from Benny's 
lips, nor an action, nor a gestiu-e, although I 
remember quite clearly how some grown-up 
people of that time looked, and the very words 
they said. 

For example, I recollect Miss Wilkes very 
distinctly, since I studied her with great de- 
liberation, and with a suspicious watchfulness 
170 



FATHER AND SON 

that was above my years. In Miss Wilkes a 
type that had hitherto been absolutely unfamiUar 
to us obtruded upon our experience. In our 
Eveless Eden, Woman, if not exactly hirsuta 
et horrida, had always been ''of a certain age." 
But Miss Wilkes was a comparatively yoimg 
thing, and she advanced not by any means un- 
conscious of her charms. All was feminine, 
all was impulsive, about Miss Wilkes ; every gest- 
ure seemed eloquent with girhsh innocence 
and the playful dawn of life. In actual years I 
fancy she was not so extremely youthful, since 
she was the responsible and trusted head-mistress 
of a large boarding-school for girls, but in her 
heart the joy of life ran high. Miss Wilkes had 
a small, roimd face, with melting eyes, and when 
she Hfted her head, her ringlets seemed to vibrate 
and shiver hke the bells of a pagoda. She had 
a charming way of clasping her hands, and holding 
them against her bodice, while she said, ''0, 
but — really now" in a manner inexpressibly 
engaging. She was very earnest, and she had 
a pleading way of calling out: "0, but aren't 
you teasing me?" which would have brought a 
tiger fawning to her crinoHne. 

After we had spent a full year without any 
social distractions, it seems that our circle of 
acquaintances had now begun to extend, in 
171 



FATHER AND SON 

spite of my Father's unwillingness to visit his 
neighbours. He was a fortress that required 
to be stormed, but there was considerable local 
curiosity about him, so that by-and-by escalading 
parties were formed, some of which were partly 
successful. In the first place, Charles Kingsley 
had never hesitated to come, from the beginning, 
ever since our arrival. He had reason to visit 
our neighbouring town rather frequently, and 
on such occasions he always marched up and 
attacked us. It was extraordinary how persistent 
he was, for my Father must have been a very- 
trying friend. I vividly recollect that a sort of 
cross-examination of would-be communicants 
was going on in our half-furnished drawing-room 
one week-day morning, when Mr. Kingsley was 
announced; my Father, in stentorian tones, 
repUed: '^Tell Mr. Kingsley that I am engaged 
in examining Scripture with certain of the Lord's 
children." And I, a httle later, kneeUng at the 
window, while the candidates were being dis- 
missed with prayer, watched the author of 
''Hypatia" nervously careering about the garden, 
very restless and impatient, yet preferring this 
ignominy to the chance of losing my Father's 
company altogether. Kingsley, a daring spirit, 
used sometimes to drag us out trawling with him 
in Torbay, and although his hawk's beak and 
172 



FATHER AND SON 

rattling voice frightened me a little, his was always 
a jolly presence that brought some refreshment 
to om* seriousness. 

But the other visitors who came in Kingsley's 
wake and without his excuse, how they disturbed 
us! We used to be seated, my Father at his 
microscope, I with my map or book, in the down- 
stairs room we called the study. There would 
be a hush aroimd us in which you could hear a sea- 
anemone sigh. Then, abruptly, would come a ring 
at the front door; my Father would bend at me 
a corrugated brow, and murmur, under his 
breath, ''What's that?" and then, at the sound 
of footsteps, would bolt into the verandah, and 
round the garden into the potting-shed. If it 
was no visitor more serious than the postman or 
the tax-gatherer, I used to go forth and coax 
the timid wanderer home. If it was a caller, 
above all a female caller, it was my privilege 
to prevaricate, remarking innocently that 'Tapa 
is out!" 

Into a paradise so carefully guarded, I know 
not how that serpent Miss Wilkes could pene- 
trate, but there she was. She "broke bread" 
with the Brethren at the adjacent town, from 
which she carried on strategical movements, which 
were, up to a certain point, highly successful. 
She professed herself deeply interested in micros- 
173 



FATHER AND SON 

copy, and desired that some of her young ladies 
should study it also. She came attended by an 
unimportant mamma, and by pupils to whom I 
had sometimes, very unwillingly, to show our 
''natural objects." They would invade us, and fill 
our quietness with chattering noise ; I could bear 
none of them, and I was singularly drawn to Miss 
Marks by finding that she disliked them too. 

By whatever arts she worked, Miss Wilkes 
certainly achieved a certain ascendency. When 
the knocks came at the front door, I was now 
instructed to see whether the visitor were not 
she, before my Father bolted to the potting- 
shed. She was an untiring hstener, ai;d my 
Father had a passion for instructing. Miss Wilkes 
was never weary of expressing what a revelation 
of the wonderful works of God in creation her 
acquaintance with us had been. She would 
gaze through the microscope at awful forms, and 
would persevere until the silver rim which marked 
the confines of the drop of water under inspection 
would ripple inwards with a flash of fight and 
vanish, because the drop itself had evaporated. 
''Well, I can only say, how marvellous are 
Thy doings!" was a frequent ejaculation of 
Miss Wilkes, and one that was very well received. 
She learned the Latin names of many of the 
species, and it seems quite pathetic to me, looking 
174 



FATHER AND SON 

back, to realise how much trouble the poor woman 
took. She *'hung/' as the expression is, upon 
my Father's every word, and one instance of this 
led to a certain revelation. 

My Father, who had an extraordinary way of say- 
ing anything that came up into his mind, stated one 
day, — the fashions, I must suppose, being under 
discussion, — that he thought white the only becom- 
ing colour for a lady's stockings. The stockings 
of Miss Wilkes had up to that horn- been of a deep 
violet, but she wore white ones in future when- 
ever she came to our house. This delicacy would 
have been beyond my unaided infant observa- 
tion, but I heard Miss Marks mention the matter, 
in terms which they supposed to be secret, to 
her confidant, and I verified it at the ancles of 
the lady. Miss Marks continued by saying, in 
confidence, and ''quite as between you and me, 
dear Mary Grace," that Miss Wilkes was a ''minx." 
I had the greatest curiosity about words, and 
as this was a new one, I looked it up in our large 
English Dictionary. But there the definition of 
the term was this: — "Minx: the female of 
minnock; a pert wanton." I was as much in 
the dark as ever. 

Whether she was the female of a minnock 
(whatever that may be) or whether she was 
only a very well-meaning schoolmistress desirous 
175 



FATHER AND SON 

of enlivening a monotonous existence, Miss 
Wilkes certainly took us out of ourselves a good 
deal. Did my Father know what danger he 
ran? It was the opinion of Miss Marks and 
of Mary Grace that he did not, and in the back- 
kitchen, a room which served those ladies as a 
private oratory in the summer-time, much prayer 
was offered up that his eyes might be opened 
ere it was too late. But I am inclined to think 
that they were open all the time, that, at all 
events, they were what the French call entr'ouvert, 
that enough light for practical purposes came 
sifted in through his eyelashes. At a later time, 
being reminded of Miss Wilkes, he said with a 
certain complaisance, ''Ah, yes! she proffered 
much entertainment during my widowed years!" 
He used to go down to her boarding-school, 
the garden of which had been the scene of a 
murder, and was romantically situated on the 
edge of a quarried cliff; he always took me 
with him, and kept me at his side all through 
these visits, notwithstanding Miss Wilkes' sohci- 
tude that the fatigue and excitement would be 
too much for the dear child's strength, unless 
I rested a little on the parlour sofa. 

About this time, the question of my educa- 
tion came up for discussion in the household, 
as indeed it well might. Miss Marks had long 
176 



FATHER AND SON 

proved practically inadequate in this respect, 
her slender acquirements evaporating, I suppose, 
like the drops of water under the microscope, 
while the field of her general duties became 
wider. The subjects in which I took pleasure, 
and upon which I possessed books, I sedulously 
taught myself; the other subjects, which formed 
the vast majority, I did not learn at all. Like 
Aurora Leigh, 

I brushed with extreme flounce 
The circle of the universe, 

especially zoology, botany and astronomy, but 
with the exphcit exception of geology, which 
my Father regarded as tending directly to the 
encouragement of infidelity. I copied a great 
quantity of maps, and read all the books of 
travels that I could find. But I acquired no 
mathematics, no languages, no history, so that 
I was in danger of gross iUiteracy in these im- 
portant departments. 

My Father grudged the time, but he felt it a 
duty to do something to fill up these deficiencies, 
and we now started Latin, in a httle eighteenth- 
century reading-book, out of which my Grand- 
father had been taught. It consisted of strings 
of words, and of grim arrangements of conjunc- 
tion and declension, presented in a manner appal- 
177 



FATHER AND SON 
lingly unattractive. I used to be set down in the 
study, under my Father's eye, to learn a sohd 
page of this compilation, while he wrote or painted. 
The window would be open in summer, and my 
seat was close to it. Outside a bee was shaking 
the clematis-blossom, or a red-admiral butterfly 
was opening and shutting his wings on the hot 
concrete of the verandah, or a blackbird was 
racing across the lawn. It was almost more than 
human nature could bear to have to sit holding 
up to my face the dreary little Latin book, with 
its sheep-skin cover that smelt of mildewed paste. 
But out of this strength there came an un- 
expected sudden sweetness. The exercise of 
hearing me repeat my strings of nouns and 
verbs had revived in my Father his memories 
of the classics. In the old sohtary years, a 
long time ago, by the shores of Canadian rapids, 
on the edge of West Indian swamps, his Virgil 
had been an inestimable solace to him. To 
extremely devout persons, there is something 
objectionable in most of the great writers of 
antiquity. Horace, Lucretius, Terence, Catullus, 
Juvenal, — in each there is one quahty or another 
definitely repulsive to a reader who is determined 
to know nothing but Christ and him crucified. 
From time immemorial, however, it has been 
recognised in the Christian church that this 
178 



FATHER AND SON 

objection does not apply to Virgil. He is the 
most evangelical of the classics ; he is the one who 
can be enjoyed with least to explain away and 
least to excuse. One evening my Father took 
down his Virgil from an upper shelf, and his 
thoughts wandered away from surrounding things ; 
he travelled in the past again. The book was a 
Delphin edition of 1798, which had followed him 
in all his wanderings; there was a great scratch 
on the sheep-skin cover that a thorn had made in 
a forest of Alabama. And then, in the twihght, 
as he shut the volume at last, oblivious of my 
presence, he began to murmur and to chant the 
adorable verses by memory. 

Tityre, tu patulge recubans sub tegmine fagi, 

he warbled ; and I stopped my play, and listened 
as if to a nightingale, till he reached 

tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra 
Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas. 

"0 Papa, what is that?" I could not prevent 
myself from asking. He translated the verses, he 
explained their meaning, but his exposition gave 
me Httle interest. What to me was beautiful 
Amarylhs? She and her love-sick Tityrus awak- 
ened no image whatever in my mind. 

But a miracle had been revealed to me, 
179 



FATHER AND SON 

the incalculable, the amazing beauty which could 
exist in the sound of verses. My prosodical 
instinct was awakened, quite suddenly that 
dim evening, as my Father and I sat alone in 
the breatfast-room after tea, serenely accepting 
the hour, for once, with no idea of exhortation 
or profit. Verse, "& breeze mid blossoms play- 
ing," as Coleridge says, descended from the 
roses as a moth might have done, and the magic 
of it took hold of my heart for ever. I per- 
suaded my Father, who was a little astonished 
at my insistence, to repeat the lines over and 
over again. At last my brain caught them, and 
as I walked in Benny's garden, or as I hung over 
the tidal pools at the edge of the sea, all my 
inner being used to ring out with the soimd of 

Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas. 



180 



CHAPTER VIII 

In the previous chapter I have dwelt on some 
of the hghter conditions of our hfe at this time; 
I must now turn to it in a less frivolous aspect. 
As my tenth year advanced, the development 
of my character gave my Father, I will not say, 
anxiety, but matter for serious reflection. My 
intelligence was now perceived to be taking a 
sudden start ; visitors drew my Father's attention 
to the fact that I was '^coming out so much." 
I grew rapidly in stature, having been a little 
shrimp of a thing up to that time, and I no 
longer appeared much younger than my years. 
Looking back, I do not think that there was any 
sudden mental development, but that the change 
was mainly a social one. I had been reserved, 
timid and taciturn; I had disliked the company 
of strangers. But with my tenth year, I certainly 
unfolded, so far as to become sociable and talka- 
tive, and perhaps I struck those around me as 
grown ''clever," because I said the things which 
181 



FATHER AND SON 

I had previously only thought. There was a 
change, no doubt, yet I believe that it was mainly 
physical, rather than mental. My excessive 
fragility — or apparent fragility, for I must have 
been always wiry — decreased; I slept better, and 
therefore grew less nervous; I ate better, and 
therefore put on flesh. If I preserved a delicate 
look — people still used to say in my presence, 
^'That dear child is not long for this world!" — it 
was in consequence of a sort of habit into which 
my body had grown ; it was a transparency which 
did not speak of what was in store for me, but 
of what I had already passed through. 

The increased activity of my intellectual 
system now showed itself in what I beheve to 
be a very healthy form, direct imitation. The 
rage for what is called ^^originahty" is pushed 
to such a length in these days that even children 
are not considered promising, unless they at- 
tempt things preposterous and unparalleled. 
From his earhest hour, the ambitious person is 
told that to make a road where none has walked 
before, to do easily what it is impossible for 
others to do at all, to create new forms of thought 
and expression, are the only recipes for genius; 
and in trying to escape on all sides from every 
resemblance to his predecessors, he adopts at 
once an air of eccentricity and pretentiousness. 
182 



FATHER AND SON 

This continues to be the accepted view of origi- 
naUty ; but, in spite of this conventional opinion, 
I hold that the healthy sign of an activity of 
mind in early youth is not to be striving after 
unheard-of miracles, but to imitate closely and 
carefully what is being said and done in the 
vicinity. The child of a great sculptor will 
hang about the studio, and will try to hammer 
a head out of a waste piece of marble with a 
nail; it does not follow that he too will be a 
sculptor. The child of a politician will sit in 
committee with a row of empty chairs, and 
will harangue an imaginary senate from behind 
the curtains. I, the son of a man who looked 
through a microscope and painted what he 
saw there, would fain observe for myself, and 
paint my observations. It did not follow, alas! 
that I was built to be a miniature-painter or a 
savant, but the activity of a childish intelligence 
was shown by my desire to copy the results of 
such energy as I saw nearest at hand. 

In the secular direction, this now took the 
form of my preparing httle monographs on sea- 
side creatures, which were arranged, tabulated 
and divided as exactly as possible on the pattern 
of those which my Father was composing for 
his ''Actinologia Britannica." I wrote these 
out upon sheets of paper of the same size as 
183 



FATHER AND SON 

his printed page, and I adorned them with 
water-colour plates, meant to emulate his pre- 
cise and exquisite illustrations. One or two 
of these ludicrous postiches are still preserved, 
and in glancing at them now I wonder, not at 
any skill that they possess, but at the persever- 
ance and the patience, the evidence of close and 
persistent labour. I was not set to these tasks 
by my Father, who, in fact, did not much ap- 
prove of them. He was touched, too, with 
the '^ originality" heresy, and exhorted me not 
to copy him, but to go out into the garden or 
the shore and describe something new, in a new 
way. That was quite impossible; I possessed 
no initiative. But I can now well understand 
why my Father, very indulgently and good- 
temperedly, deprecated these exercises of mine. 
They took up, and, as he might well think, 
wasted, an enormous quantity of time; and 
they were, moreover, parodies, rather than 
imitations, of his writings, for I invented new 
species, with sapphire spots and crimson tentacles 
and amber bands, which were close enough to 
his real species to be disconcerting. He came 
from conscientiously shepherding the flocks of 
ocean, and I do not wonder that my ring-straked, 
speckled and spotted varieties put him out of 
countenance. If I had not been so innocent and 
184 



FATHER AND SON 

solemn, he might have fancied I was mocking 
him. 

These extraordinary excm'sions into science, 
falsely so called, occupied a large part of my 
time. There was a httle spare room at the 
back of om* house, dedicated to lumber and to 
empty portmanteaux. There was a table in it 
already, and I added a stool; this cheerless 
apartment now became my study. I spent so 
many hours here, in solitude and without making 
a sound, that my Father's curiosity, if not his 
suspicion, was occasionally roused, and he would 
make a sudden raid on me. I was always dis- 
covered, doubled up over the table, with my 
pen and ink, or else my box of colours and tum- 
bler of turbid water by my hand, working away 
like a Chinese student shut up in his matriculat- 
ing box. It might have been done for a wager, 
if anything so sinful had ever been dreamed 
of in our pious household. The apparatus was 
slow and laboured. In order to keep my un- 
couth handwriting in bounds, I was obliged to 
rule not hues only, but borders to my pages. 
The subject did not lend itself to any flow of 
language, and I was obliged incessantly to bor- 
row sentences, word for word, from my Father's 
published books. Discouraged by every one 
around me, daunted by the laborious effort need- 
185 



FATHER AND SON 

fill to carry out the scheme, it seems odd to me 
now that I persisted in so strange and wearisome 
an employment, but it became an absorbing 
passion, and was indugled in to the neglect of 
other lessons and other pleasures. 

^ly Father, as the spring advanced, used to 
come up to the Box-room, as my retreat was 
called, and hunt me out into the sunshine. But 
I soon crept back to my mania. It gave him 
much trouble, and Miss Marks, who thought 
it sheer idleness, was vociferous in objection. 
She would have gladly torn up all my writings 
and paintings, and have set me to a useful task. 
My Father, with his strong natural individuaUsm, 
could not take this view. He was interested 
in this strange freak of mine, and he could not 
wholly condemn it. But he must have thought 
it a little crazy, and it is evident to me now 
that it led to the revolution in domestic pohty 
by which he began to encourage my acquaint- 
ance with other young people as much as 
he had previously discouraged it. He saw 
that I could not be allowed to spend my whole 
time in a little stuffy room making solemn and 
ridiculous imitations of Papers read before the 
Linnsean Society. He was grieved, moreover, 
at the badness of my pictures, for I had no native 
skill; and he tried to teach me his own system 
186 



FATHER AND SON 

of miniature-painting as applied to natural 
history. I was forced, in deep depression of 
spirits, to turn from my grotesque monographs, 
and paint under my Father's eye, and from a 
finished drawing of his, a gorgeous tropic bird 
in flight. Aided by my habit of imitation, 
I did at length produce something which might 
have shown promise, if it had not been wrimg 
from me, touch by touch, pigment by pigment, 
under the orders of a task-master. 

All this had its absurd side, but I seem to 
perceive that it had also its value. It is, surely, 
a mistake to look too near at hand for the bene- 
fits of education. What is actually taught in 
early childhood is often that part of training 
which makes least impression on the character, 
and is of the least permanent importance. My 
labom's failed to make me a zoologist, and the 
multitude of my designs and my descriptions 
have left me helplessly ignorant of the anatomy 
of a sea-anemone. But I cannot look upon the 
mental discipline as useless. It taught me to 
concentrate my attention, to define the nature 
of distinctions, to see accurately, and to name 
what I saw. Moreover, it gave me the habit of 
going on with any piece of work I had in hand, 
not flagging because the interest or pictu- 
resqueness of the theme had declined, but pushing 
187 



FATHER AND SON 

forth towards a definite goal, well-foreseen and 
limited beforehand. For almost any intellectual 
employment in later hfe, it seems to me that 
this discipline was valuable. I am, however, not 
the less conscious how ludicrous was the mode in 
which, in my tenth year, I obtained it. 

My spiritual condition occupied my Father's 
thoughts very insistently at this time. Closing, 
as he did, most of the doors of worldly pleasure 
and energy upon his conscience, he had con- 
tinued to pursue his scientific investigations 
without any sense of sin. Most fortunate it 
was, that the collecting of marine animals in 
the tidal pools, and the description of them in 
pages which were addressed to the wide scientific 
public, at no time occurred to him as in any 
way inconsistent with his holy calling. His 
conscience was so delicate, and often so morbid 
in its dehcacy, that if that had occurred to him, 
he would certainly have abandoned his investi- 
gations, and have been left without an employ- 
ment. But happily he justified his investigation 
by regarding it as a glorification of God's created 
works. In the introduction to his ''Actinologia 
Britannica," written at the time which I have 
now reached in this narrative, he sent forth his 
labours with a phrase which I should think un- 
paralleled in connection with a learned and 
188 



FATHER AND SON 

technical biological treatise. He stated concern- 
ing that book, that he published it ''as one more 
tribute humbly offered to the glory of the Triune 
God, who is wonderful in counsel, and excellent 
in working." Scientific investigation sincerely 
carried out in that spirit became a kind of week- 
day interpretation of the current creed of Sun- 
days. 

The development of my faculties, of which 
I have spoken, extended to the religious sphere 
no less than to the secular. Here also, as I 
look back, I see that I was extremely imitative. 
I expanded in the warmth of my Father's fervour, 
and, on the whole, in a manner that was 
satisfactory to him. He observed the richer 
hold that I was now taking on fife; he saw my 
faculties branching in many directions, and he 
became very anxious to secure my maintenance 
in grace. In earHer years, certain sides of my 
character had offered a sort of passive resistance 
to his ideas. I had let what I did not care to 
welcome pass over my mind in the curious density 
that children adopt in order to avoid receiving 
impressions — blankly, dumbly, achieving by stu- 
pidity what they cannot achieve by argument. 
I think that I had frequently done this; that 
he had been brought up against a dead wall; 
although on other sides of my nature I had been 
189 



FATHER AND SON 

responsive and docile. But now, in my tenth 
year, the imitative faculty got the upper hand, 
and nothing seemed so attractive as to be what 
I was expected to be. If there was a doubt now, 
it lay in the other direction; it seemed hardly 
normal that so young a child should appear so 
receptive and so apt. 

My Father believed himself justified, at this 
juncture, in making a tremendous effort. He 
wished to secure me finally, exhaustively, before 
the age of puberty could dawn, before my soul 
was fettered with the love of carnal things. He 
thought that if I could now be identified with 
the "saints," and could stand on exactly their 
footing, a habit of conformity would be secured. 
I should meet the paganising tendencies of ad- 
vancing years with security if I could be fore- 
armed with all the weapons of a sanctified life. He 
wished me, in short, to be received into the com- 
munity of the Brethren on the terms of an adult. 
There were difficulties in the way of carrying 
out this scheme, and they were urged upon him, 
more or less courageously, by the elders of the 
church. But he overbore them. What the diffi- 
culties were, and what were the arguments which 
he used to sweep those 'difficulties away, I must 
now explain, for in this lay the centre of our 
future relations as father and son. 
190 



FATHER AND SON 

In dealing with the peasants around him, 
among whom he was engaged in an active propa- 
ganda, my Father always insisted on the neces- 
sity of conversion. There must be a new birth 
and being, a fresh creation in God. This crisis 
he was accustomed to regard as manifesting 
itself in a sudden and definite upheaval. There 
might have been prolonged practical piety, 
deep and true contrition for sin, but these, al- 
though the natural and suitable prologue to con- 
version, were not conversion itself. People hung 
on at the confines of regeneration, often for a 
very long time; my Father dealt earnestly with 
them, the elders ministered to them, with ex- 
planation, exhortation and prayer. Such persons 
were in a gracious state, but they were not in 
a state of grace. If they should suddenly die, 
they would pass away in an unconverted con- 
dition, and all that could be said in their favour 
was a vague expression of hope that they would 
benefit from God's uncovenanted mercies. 

But on some day, at some hour and minute, if 
life was spared to them, the way of salvation 
would be revealed to these persons in such an 
aspect that they would be enabled instanta- 
neously to accept it. They would take it con- 
sciously, as one takes a gift from the hand that 
offers it. This act of taking was the process 
191 



FATHER AND SON 

of conversion, and the person who so accepted 
was a child of God now, although a single minute 
ago he had been a child of wrath. The very- 
root of human nature had to be changed, and, 
in the majority of cases, this change was sudden, 
patent, palpable. 

I have just said, ''in the majority of cases," 
because my Father admitted the possibihty of 
exceptions. The formula was, ''If any man 
hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his." 
As a rule, no one could possess the Spirit of 
Christ, without a conscious and full abandonment 
of the soul, and this, however carefully led up to, 
and prepared for with tears and renunciations, was 
not, could not, be made, except at a set moment 
of time. Faith, in an esoteric and almost sym- 
bolic sense, was necessary, and could not be a 
result of argument, but was a state of heart. In 
these opinions my Father departed no wise from 
the strict evangelical doctrine of the Protestant 
churches, but he held it in a mode and with a 
severity peculiar to himself. Now, it is plain 
that this state of heart, this voluntary deed of 
acceptance, presupposed a full and rational 
consciousness of the relations of things. It 
might be clearly achieved by a person of hum- 
ble cultivation, but only by one who was fully 
capable of independent thought, in other words 
192 



FATHER AND SON 

by a more or less adult person. The man or 
woman claiming the privileges of conversion 
must be able to understand and to grasp what 
his religious education was aiming at. 

It is extraordinary what trouble it often gave 
my Father to know whether he was justified in 
admitting to the communion people of very lim- 
ited powers of expression. A harmless, humble 
labouring man would come with a request to be 
allowed to ''break bread." It was only by the 
use of strong leading questions that he could be 
induced to mention Christ as the ground of his 
trust at all. I recollect an elderly agricultural 
labourer being closeted for a long time with my 
Father, who came out at last, in a sort of dazed 
condition, and replied to our inquiries, — with a 
shrug of his shoulders as he said it, — ''I was obliged 
to put the Name and Blood and Work of Jesus 
into his very mouth. It is true that he assented 
cordially at last, but I confess I was grievously 
daunted by the poor intelligence!" 

But there was, or there might be, another class 
of persons, whom early training, separation from 
the world, and the care of godly parents had so 
early familiarised with the acceptable calhng of 
Christ that their conversion had occurred, unper- 
ceived and therefore unrecorded, at an extraor- 
dinarily early age. It would be in vain to look for 
193 



FATHER AND SON 

a repetition of the phenomenon in those cases. 
The heavenly fire must not be expected to descend 
a second time ; the hps are touched with the burn- 
ing coal once, and once only. If, accordingly, these 
precociously selected spirits are to be excluded 
because no new birth is observed in them at a 
mature age, they must continue outside in the 
cold, since the phenomenon cannot be repeated. 
When, therefore, there is not possible any further 
doubt of their being in possession of salvation, 
longer delay is useless, and worse than useless. 
The fact of conversion, though not recorded nor 
even recollected, must be accepted on the evi- 
dence of confession of faith, and as soon as the 
intelligence is evidently developed, the person 
not merely may, but should be accepted into com- 
munion, although still immature in body, although 
in years still even a child. This my Father be- 
lieved to be my case, and in this rare class did he 
fondly persuade himself to station me. 

As I have said, the congregation, — although 
docile aiid timid, and little able, as units, to hold 
their own against their minister, — behind his back 
were faintly hostile to this plan. None of their 
own children had ever been so much as suggested 
for membership, and each of themselves, in ripe 
years, had been subjected to severe cross-exam- 
ination. I think it was rather a bitter pill for 
194 



FATHER AND SON 

some of them to swallow that a pert httle boy of 
ten should be admitted, as a grown-up person, to 
all the hard-won privileges of their order. Mary- 
Grace Burmington came back from her visits to 
the cottagers, reporting disaffection here and 
there, grumblings in the rank and file. But quite 
as many, especially of the women, enthusiastically 
supported my Father's wish, gloried aloud in the 
manifestations of my early piety, and professed 
to see in it something of miraculous promise. 
The expression ''another Infant Samuel" was 
widely used. I became quite a subject of con- 
tention. A war of the sexes threatened to break 
out over me; I was a disturbing element at cot- 
tage breakfasts. I was mentioned at public 
prayer-meetings, not indeed by name, but, in 
the extraordinary illusive way customary in the 
devotions, as ''one amongst us of tender years" 
or as "a sapling in the Lord's vineyard." 

To all this my Father put a stop in his own 
high-handed fashion. After the morning meet- 
ing, one Sunday in the autumn of 1859, he de- 
sired the attention of the saints to a personal 
matter which was, perhaps, not unfamiliar to 
them by rumour. That was, he explained, the 
question of the admission of his beloved httle 
son to the commimion of saints in the breaking of 
bread. He allowed — and I sat there in evidence, 
195 



FATHER AND SON 

palely smiling at the audience, my feet scarcely 
touching the ground — that I was not what is styled 
adult; I was not, he frankly admitted, a grown- 
up person. But I was adult in a knowledge of 
the Lord; I possessed an insight into the plan of 
salvation which many a hoary head might envy 
for its fullness, its clearness, its conformity with 
Scripture doctrine. This was a palpable hit at 
more than one stumbler and fumbler after the 
truth, and several hoary heads were bowed. 
My Father then went on to explain very fully 
the position which I have already attempted to 
define. He admitted the absence in my case 
of a sudden, apparent act of conversion resulting 
upon conviction of sin. But he stated the groimds 
of his behef that I had, in still earher infancy, been 
converted, and he declared that if so, I ought no 
longer to be excluded from the privileges of com- 
munion. He said, mroeover, that he was will- 
ing on this occasion to waive his own privilege 
as a minister, and that he would rather call on 
Brother Fawkes and Brother Bere, the leading 
elders, to examine the candidate in his stead. 
This was a master-stroke, for Brothers Fawkes and 
Bere had been suspected of leading the disaffec- 
tion, and this threw all the burden of responsi- 
bility on them. The meeting broke up in great 
amiabihty, and my Father and I went home to- 
196 



FATHER AND SON 

gether in the very highest of spirits. I, indeed, 
in my pride, touched the verge of indiscretion 
by saying: ''When I have been admitted to fellow- 
ship, Papa, shall I be allowed to call you 'be- 
loved Brother'?" My Father was too well 
pleased with the morning's work to be critical. 
He laughed, and answered; "That, my love, 
though strictly correct, would hardly, I fear, be 
thought judicious!" 

It was suggested that my tenth birthday, 
which followed this public announcement by a 
few days, would be a capital occasion for me to 
go through the ordeal. Accordingly, after dark 
(for our new lamp was lighted for the first time 
in honour of the event), I withdrew alone into our 
drawing-room, which had just, at length, been 
furnished, and which looked, I thought, very 
smart. Hither came to me, first Brother Fawkes, 
by himself; then Brother Bere, by himself; and 
then both together, so that you may say, if you 
are pedantically inchned, that I underwent three 
successive interviews. My Father, out of sight 
somewhere, was, of course, playing the part of 
stage manager. 

I felt not at all shy, but so liighly strung that 
my whole nature seemed to throb with excitement. 
My first examiner, on the other hand, was ex- 
tremely confused. Fawkes, who was a builder in 
197 



FATHER AND SON 

a small business of his own, was short and fat ; his 
complexion, which wore a deeper and more uni- 
form rose-colour than usual, I observed to be 
starred with dewdi'ops of nervous emotion, which 
he wiped away at intervals with a large bandana 
handkerchief. He was so long in coming to the 
point, that I was obliged to lead him to it my- 
self, and I sat up on the sofa in the full lamplight, 
and testified my faith in the atonement with a 
fluency that surprised myself. Before I had done, 
Fawkes, a middle-aged man with the reputation of 
being a very stiff employer of labour, was weeping 
like a child. 

Bere, the carpenter, a long, thin and dry man, 
with a curiously immobile eye, did not fall so 
easily a prey to my fascinations. He put me 
through my paces very sharply, for he had some- 
thing of the temper of an attorney mingled with 
his rehgiousness. However, I was equal to him, 
and he, too, though he held his own head higher, 
was not less impressed than Fawkes had been, by 
the surroundings of the occasion. Neither of 
them had ever been in our drawing-room since it 
was furnished, and I thought that each of them 
noticed how smart the wall-paper was. Indeed, 
I beheve I drew their attention to it. After the 
two sohtary examinations were over, the elders 
came in again, as I have said, and they prayed 
198 



FATHER AND SON 

for a long time. We all three knelt at the sofa, I 
between them. But by this time, to my great 
exaltation of spirits there had succeeded an 
equally dismal depression. It was my turn now 
to weep, and I dimly remember my Father com- 
ing into the room, and my being carried up to bed, 
in a state of collapse and fatigue, by the silent 
and kindly Miss Marks. 

On the following Sunday morning, I was the 
principal subject which occupied an unusually 
crowded meeting. My Father, looking whiter 
and yet darker than usual, called upon Brother 
Fawkes and Brother Bere to state to the assembled 
saints what their experiences had been in con- 
nection with their visits to '^one" who desired 
to be admitted to the breaking of bread. It was 
tremendously exciting to me to hear myself 
spoken of with this impersonal publicity, and I 
had no fear of the result. 

Events showed that I had no need of fear. 
Fawkes and Bere were sometimes accused of 
a rivalry, which indeed broke out a few years 
later, and gave my Father much anxiety and 
pain. But on this occasion their unanimity 
was wonderful. Each strove to exceed the 
other in the tributes which they paid to my piety. 
My answers had been so full and clear, my hu- 
mility (save the mark!) had been so sweet, my 
199 



FATHER AND SON 

acquaintance with Scripture so amazing, my 
testimony to all the leading principles of salva- 
tion so distinct and exhaustive, that they could 
only say that they had felt confounded, and yet 
deeply cheered and led far along their own heav- 
enly path, by hearing such accents fall from the 
lips of a babe and a suckhng. I did not like be- 
ing described as a suckling, but every lot has its 
crumpled rose-leaf, and in all other respects the 
report of the elders was a triumph. My Father 
then clenched the whole matter by rising and 
announcing that I had expressed an independent 
desire to confess the Lord by the act of public 
baptism, immediately after which I should be ad- 
mitted to communion ''as an adult." Emotion 
ran so high at this, that a large portion of the con- 
gi'egation insisted on walking with us back to 
our garden-gate, to the stupefaction of the rest 
of the villagers. 

My public baptism was the central event of 
my whole childhood. Everything, since the ear- 
nest dawn of consciousness, seemed to have been 
leading up to it. Everything, afterwards, seemed 
to be leading down and away from it. The prac- 
tice of immersing communicants on the sea- 
beach at Oddicombe had now been completely 
abandoned, but we possessed as yet no tank for 
a baptismal purpose in our own Room. The Room 
200 



FATHER AND SON 

in the adjoining town, however, was really quite 
a large chapel, and it was amply provided with 
the needful conveniences. It was our practice, 
therefore, at this time, to claim the hospitahty 
of our neighbours. Baptisms were made an oc- 
casion for friendly relations between the two con- 
gregations, and led to pleasant social intercourse. 
I believe that the ministers and elders of the two 
meetings arranged to combine their forces at 
these times, and to baptize communicants from 
both congregations. 

The minister of the town meeting was Mr. S., 
a very handsome old gentleman, of venerable and 
powerful appearance. He had snowy hair and a 
long white beard, but from under shaggy eyebrows 
there blazed out great black eyes which warned 
the beholder that the snow was an ornament and 
not a sign of decrepitude. The eve of my bap- 
tism at length drew near; it was fixed for October 
12, almost exactly three weeks 'after my tenth 
birthday. I was dressed in old clothes, and a suit 
of smarter things was packed up in a carpet- 
bag. After night-fall, this carpet-bag, accom- 
panied by my Father, myself, Miss Marks and 
Mary Grace, was put in a four-wheeled cab, and 
driven, a long way in the dark, to the chapel of 
our friends. There we were received, in a blaze 
of Hghts, with a pressure of hands, with a mur- 
201 



FATHER AND SON 

mur of voices, with ejaculations and even with 
tears, and were conducted, amid unspeakable 
emotion, to places of honour in the front row of 
the congregation. 

The scene was one which would have been im- 
pressive, not merely to such hermits as we were, 
but even to worldly persons accustomed to life 
and to its curious and variegated experiences. 
To me it was dazzling beyond words, inexpres- 
sibly exciting, an initiation to every kind of pub- 
hcity and glory. There were many candidates, 
but the rest of them, — mere grown-up men and 
women, — gave thanks aloud that it was their 
privilege to follow where I led. I was the ac- 
knowledged hero of the hour. Those were days 
when newspaper enterprise was scarcely in its 
infancy, and the event owed nothing to journal- 
istic effort. In spite of that, the news of this re- 
markable ceremony, the immersion of a little 
boy of ten years old ''as an adult," had spread 
far and wide through the county in the course 
of three weeks. The chapel of our hosts was, as 
I have said, very large ; it was commonly too large 
for their needs, but on this night it was crowded 
to the ceiling, and the crowd had come — as every 
soft murmurer assured me — to see me. 

There were people there who had travelled from 
Exeter, from Dartmouth, from Totnes, to witness 
202 



FATHER AND SON 

so extraordinary a ceremony. There was one old 
woman of eighty-five who had come, my neigh- 
bom-s whispered to me, all the way from Moreton- 
Hampstead, on pm-pose to see me baptized. I 
looked at her crmnpled countenance with amaze- 
ment, for there was no cm-iosity, no interest vis- 
ible in it. She sat there perfectly listless, look- 
ing at nothing, but chewing between her toothless 
gums what appeared to be a jujube. 

In the centre of the chapel-floor a number of 
planks had been taken up, and revealed a pool 
which might have been supposed to be a small 
swimming-bath. We gazed down into this dark 
square of mysterious waters, from the tepid sur- 
face of which faint swirls of vapour rose. The 
whole congregation was arranged, tier above 
tier, about the four straight sides of this pool; 
every person was able to see what happened in 
it without any unseemly struggling or standing 
on forms. Mr. S. now rose, an impressive hier- 
atic figure, conmianding attention and imploring 
perfect silence. He held a small book in his hand, 
and he was preparing to give out the number of a 
hymn, when an astounding incident took place. 

There was a great splash, and a tall young woman 

was perceived to be in the baptismal pool, her 

arms waving above her head, and her figure held 

upright in the water by the inflation of the air 

203 



FATHER AND SON 

underneath her crinoline, which was blown out 
like a bladder, as in some extravagant old fashion- 
plate. AVhether her feet touched the bottom of 
the font I cannot say, but I suppose they did so. 
An indescribable turmoil of shrieks and cries fol- 
lowed on this extraordinary apparition. A great 
many people excitedly called upon other people 
to be calm, and an instance was given of the re- 
mark of James Smith that 

He who, in quest of quiet, "Silence!" hoots 
Is apt to make the hubbub he imputes. 

The young woman, in a more or less fainting 
condition, was presently removed from the 
water, and taken into the sort of tent which 
was prepared for candidates. It was found 
that she herself had wished to be a candidate 
and had earnestly desired to be baptized, but 
that this had been forbidden by her parents. 
On the supposition that she fell in by accident, 
a pious coincidence was detected in this affair; 
the Lord had pre-ordained that she should be 
baptized in spite of all opposition. But my 
Father, in his shrewd way, doubted. He pointed 
out to us, next morning, that, in the first place, 
she had not, in any sense, been baptized, as 
her head had not been immersed; and that, 
in the second place, she must have deliberately 
204 



FATHER AND SON 

jumped in, since, had she stumbled and fallen 
forward, her hands and face would have struck 
the water, whereas they remained quite dry. 
She belonged, however, to the neighbcui^ congre- 
gation, and we had no responsibihty to pursue 
the inquiry any fui-ther. 

Decorum being again secured, Mr. S., with 
unimpaired dignity, proposed to the congrega- 
tion a h3nim, which was long enough to occupy 
them during the preparations for the actual 
baptism. He then retired to the vestry, and 
I (for I was to be the first to testify) was led by 
Miss Marks and Mary Grace into the species of 
tent of which I have just spoken. Its pale 
sides seemed to shake with the jubilant singing 
of the saints outside, while part of my clothing 
was removed and I was prepared for immersion. 
A sudden cessation of the hymn warned us that 
the Minister was now ready, and we emerged 
into the glare of lights and faces to find Mr. S. 
already standing in the water up to his knees. 
Feeling as small as one of our microscopical 
specimens, almost infinitesimally tiny as I de- 
scended into his Titanic arms, I was handed 
down the steps to him. He was dressed in a 
kind of long surphce, underneath which — as 
I could not, even in that moment, help observing 
— the air gathered in long bubbles which he strove 
205 



FATHER AND SON 

to flatten out. The end of his noble beard he 
tucked away; his shirt-sleeves were turned up 
at the wrist. 

The entire congregation was now silent, so 
silent that the uncertain splashing of my feet 
as I descended seemed to deafen me. Mr. S., 
a little embarrassed by my short stature, suc- 
ceeded at length in securing me with one 
palm on my chest and the other between my 
shoulders. He said, slowly, in a loud, sonorous 
voice that seemed to enter my brain and empty 
it, ''I baptize thee, my Brother, in the name 
of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy 
Ghost!" Having intoned this formula, he then 
gently flung me backwards until I was wholly 
under the water, and then — as he brought me up 
again, and tenderly steadied my feet on the 
steps of the font, and delivered me, dripping 
and sputtering, into the anxious hands of the 
women, who hiu'ried me to the tent — the whole 
assembly broke forth in a thunder of song, a 
paean of praise to God for this manifestation of 
his marvellous goodness and mercy. So great 
was the enthusiasm, that it could hardly be 
restrained so as to allow the other candidates, 
the humdrum adults who followed in my wet 
and glorious footsteps, to undergo a ritual about 
which, in their case, no one in the congregation 
206 



FATHER AND SON 

pretended to be able to take even the most 
languid interest. 

My Father's happiness during the next few 
weeks it is now pathetic to me to look back upon. 
His sternness melted into a universal complaisance. 
He laughed and smiled, he paid to my opinions 
the tribute of the gravest consideration, he in- 
dulged, — utterly unlike his wont, — in shy and 
furtive caresses. I could express no wish that 
he did not attempt to fulfil, and the only warning 
which he cared to give me was one, very gently 
expressed, against spiritual pride. 

This was certainly required, for I was puffed out 
with a sense of my own hoHness. I was rehgiously 
confidential with my Father, condescending with 
Miss Marks (who I think had given up trying to 
make it all out), haughty with the servants and 
insufferably patronising with those young com- 
panions of my own age with whom I was now 
beginning to associate. 

I would fain close this remarkable episode on a 
key of solemnity, but alas! if I am to be loyal to 
the truth, I must record that some of the other 
httle boys presently complained to Mary Grace 
that I put out my tongue at them in mockery, 
during the service in the Room, to remind them 
that I now broke bread as one of the "Saints" 
and that they did not. 

207 



CHAPTER IX 

The result of my being admitted into the com- 
munion of the ''Saints" was that, as soon as the 
nine days' wonder of the thing passed by, my 
position became, if anything, more harassing 
and pressed than ever. It is true that freedom 
was permitted to me in certain directions; I was 
allowed to act a little more on my own responsi- 
biUty, and was not so incessantly informed what 
'Hhe Lord's will" might be in this matter and 
in that, because it was now conceived that, in 
such dilemmas, I could command private intelh- 
gence of my own. But there was no relaxation 
of our rigid manner of Hfe, and I think I now 
began, by comparing it with the habits of others, 
to perceive how very strict it was. 

The main difference in my lot as a communicant 
from that of a mere dweller in the tents of right- 
eousness was that I was expected to respond with 
instant fervour to every appeal of conscience. 
When I did not do this, my position was almost 
208 



FATHER AND SON 

worse than it had been before, because of the 
liveher nature of the responsibihty which weighed 
upon me. My Httle faults of conduct, too, 
assumed shapes of terrible importance, since 
they proceeded from one so signally enlightened. 
My Father was never tired of reminding me that, 
now that I was a professing Christian, I must 
remember, in everything I did, that I was an 
example to others. He used to draw dreadful 
pictures of supposititious little boys who were 
secretly watching me from afar, and whose 
whole career, in time and in eternity, might be 
disastrously affected if I did not keep my lamp 
burning. 

The year which followed upon my baptism did 
not open very happily at the Room. Consider- 
able changes had now taken place in the com- 
munity. My Father's impressive services, a cer- 
tain prestige in his preaching, the mere fact that 
so vigorous a person was at the head of affairs, 
had induced a large increase in the attendance. 
By this time, if my memory does not fail me as 
to dates, we had left the dismal loft over the 
stables, and had built ourselves a perfectly plain, 
but commodious and well-arranged chapel in the 
centre of the village. This greatly added to the 
prosperity of the meeting. Everything had com- 
bined to make our services popular, and had 
209 



FATHER AND SON 

attracted to us a new element of younger people. 
Numbers of youthful masons and carpenters, shop- 
girls and domestic servants, found the Room a 
pleasant trysting-place, and were more or less 
superficially induced to accept salvation as it 
was offered to them in my Father's searching 
addresses. My Father was very shrewd in deal- 
ing with mere curiosity or idle motive, and sharply 
packed off any youths who simply came to make 
eyes at the girls, or any ''maids" whose only 
object was to display their new bonnet-strings. 
But he was powerless against a temporary sin- 
cerity, the simulacrum of a true change of heart. 
I have often heard him say, — of some yoimg 
fellow who had attended our services with fervour 
for a Httle while, and then had turned cold and 
left us, — ''and I thought that the Holy Ghost had 
wrought in him!" Such disappointments griev- 
ously depress an evangelist. 

Religious bodies are liable to strange and un- 
accountable fluctuations. At the beginning of 
the third year since our arrival the congregation 
seemed to be in a very prosperous state, as regards 
attendance, conversions and other outward signs 
of activity. Yet it was quite soon after this that 
my Father began to be harassed by all sorts of 
troubles, and the spring of 1860 was a critical 
moment in the history of the community. Al- 
210 



FATHER AND SON 

though he loved to take a very high tone about 
the Saints, and involved them sometimes in a 
cloud of laudatory metaphysics, the truth was 
that they were nothing more than peasants of a 
somewhat primitive type, not well instructed in 
the rules of conduct and hable to exactly the 
same weaknesses as invade the rural character 
in every country and latitude. That they were 
exhorted to behave as ''children of light," and 
that the majority of them sincerely desired to 
do credit to their high calling, could not prevent 
their being beset by the sins which had affected 
their forebears for generations past. 

The addition of so many young persons of each 
sex to the communion led to an entirely new class 
of embarrassment. Now there arose endless diffi- 
culties about ''engagements," about youthful 
brethren who "went out walking" with even more 
youthful sisters. Glancing over my Father's 
notes, I observe the ceaseless repetition of cases 
in which So-and-So is "courting" Such-an-one, 
followed by the melancholy record that he has 
"deserted" her. In my Father's stern language, 
"desertion" would very often mean no more than 
that the amatory pair had blamelessly changed 
their minds; but in some cases it meant more 
and worse than this. It was a very great dis- 
tress to him that sometimes the young men and 
.211 



FATHER AND SON 

women who showed the most lively interest in 
Scripture, and who had apparently accepted the 
way of salvation with the fullest intelligence, 
were precisely those who seemed to struggle with 
least success against a temptation to imchastity. 
He put this down to the concentrated malignity 
of Satan, who directed his most poisoned darts 
against the fairest of the flock. 

In addition to these troubles, there came re- 
criminations, mutual charges of drunkenness in 
private, all sorts of petty jealousy and scandal. 
There were frequent definite acts of "backsliding" 
on the part of members, who had in consequence 
to be ''put away." No one of these cases might 
be in itself extremely serious, but when many of 
them came together they seemed to indicate that 
the church was in an unhealthy condition. The 
particulars of many of these scandals were con- 
cealed from me, but I was an adroit little pitcher, 
and had cultivated the art of seeming to be inter- 
ested in something else, a book or a flower, while 
my elders were talking confidentially. As a rule, 
while I would fain have acquired more details, 
I was fairly well-informed about the errors of the 
Saints, although I was often quaintly ignorant 
of the real nature of those en*ors. 

Not infrequently, persons who had fallen into 
sin repented of it under my Father's penetrating 
212 



FATHER AND SON 

ministrations. They were apt in their penitence 
to use strange symboHc expressions. I remember 
Mrs. Pewings, our washerwoman, who had been 
accused of intemperance and had been suspended 
from communion, reappearing with a face that 
shone with soap and sanctification, and saying to 
me, ''Oh! blessed Child, you're wonderin' to zee 
old Pewings here again, but He have rolled away 
my mountain!" For once, I was absolutely at a 
loss, but she meant that the Lord had removed 
the load of her sins, and restored her to a state 
of grace. 

It was in consequence of these backslidings, 
which had become alarmingly frequent, that early 
in 1860 my Father determined on proclaiming a 
solemn fast. He delivered one Sunday what 
seemed to me an awe-inspiring address, calling 
upon us all closely to examine our consciences, 
and reminding us of the appalling fate of the 
church of Laodicea. He said that it was not 
enough to have made a satisfactory confession of 
faith, nor even to have sealed that confession in 
baptism, if we did not live up to our protestations. 
Salvation, he told us, must indeed precede holi- 
ness of life, yet both are essential. It was a dark 
and rainy winter morning when he made this 
terrible address, which frightened the congrega- 
tion extremely. When the marrow was congealed 
213 



FATHER AND SON 

within our bones, and when the bowed heads be- 
fore him, and the faintly audible sobs of the women 
in the background told him that his lesson had 
gone home, he pronounced the keeping of a day 
in the following week as a fast of contrition. 
"Those of you who have to pursue your daily 
occupations will pursue them, but sustained only 
by the bread of affliction and by the water of 
affliction." 

His influence over these gentle peasant people 
was certainly remarkable, for no effort was 
made to resist his exhortation. It was his 
customary plan to stay a little while, after the 
morning meeting was over, and in a very affable 
fashion to shake hands with the saints. But on 
this occasion he stalked forth without a word, 
holding my hand tight until we had swept out 
into the street. 

How the rest of the congregation kept this fast 
I do not know. But it was a dreadful day for 
us. I was awakened in the pitchy night to go 
off with my Father to the Room, where a scanty 
gathering held a penitential prayer-meeting. We 
came home, as dawn was breaking, and in process 
of time sat down to breakfast, which consisted — 
at that dismal hour — of slices of dry bread and a 
tumbler of cold water each. During the morning, 
I was not allowed to paint or write, or withdraw 
214 



FATHER AND SON 

to my study in the box-room. We sat, in a state 
of depression not to be described, in the breakfast- 
room, reading books of a devotional character, 
with occasional wailing of some very doleful hymn. 
Our midday dinner came at last; the meal was 
strictly confined, as before, to dry shces of the 
loaf and a tumbler of water. 

The afternoon would have been spent as 
the morning was, and so my Father spent 
it. But Miss Marks, seeing my white cheeks 
and the dark rings round my eyes, besought 
leave to take me out for a walk. This 
was permitted, with a pledge that I should 
be given no species of refreshment. Although I 
told Miss Marks, in the course of the walk, that I 
was feeUng ''so leer" (our Devonshire phrase for 
hungry), she dared not break her word. Our last 
meal was of the former character, and the day 
ended by our trapsing through the wet to another 
prayer-meeting, whence I returned in a state 
bordering on collapse, and was put to bed without 
further nourishment. There was no great hard- 
ship in all this, I daresay, but it was certainly 
rigorous. My Father took pains to see that what 
he had said about the bread and water of affliction 
was carried out in the bosom of his own family, 
and by no one more unflinchingly than by himself. 

My attitude to other people's souls when I 
215 



FATHER AND SON 

was out of my Father's sight was now a constant 
anxiety to me. In our tattling world of small 
things he had extraordinary opportunities of learn- 
ing how I behaved when I was away from home; 
I did not realise this, and I used to think his ac- 
quaintance with my deeds and words savoured 
almost of wizardry. He was accustomed to urge 
upon me the necessity of ''speaking for Jesus in 
season and out of season," and he so worked upon 
my feelings that I would start forth like St. 
Teresa, wild for the Moors and martyrdom. But 
any actual impact with persons marvellously 
cooled my zeal, and I should hardly ever have 
''spoken" at all if it had not been for that \m- 
fortunate phrase "out of season." It really 
seemed that one must talk of nothing else, since 
if an occasion was not in season it was out of 
season; there was no alternative, no close time 
for souls. 

My Father was very generous. He used to 
magnify any Uttle effort that I made, with 
stammering tongue, to sanctify a visit; and peo- 
ple, I now see, were accustomed to give me a 
friendly lead in this direction, so that they might 
please him by reporting that I had "testified" in 
the Lord's service. The whole thing, however, 
was artificial, and was part of my Father's restless 
inability to let well alone. It was not in harshness 
216 



FATHER AND SON 

or in ill-nature that he worried me so much; on 
the contrary, it was all part of his too-anxious 
love. He was in a hurry to see me become a 
shining light, everything that he had himself 
desired to be, yet with none of his short- 
comings. 

It was about this time that he harrowed my 
whole soul into painful agitation by a phrase that 
he let fall, without, I beheve, attaching any par- 
ticular importance to it at the time. He was 
occupied, as he so often was, in pohshing and 
burnishing my faith, and he was led to speak of 
the day when I should ascend the pulpit to preach 
my first sermon. ''Oh! if I may be there, out 
of sight, and hear the gospel message proclaimed 
from your lips, then I shall say, 'My poor work 
is done. Oh! Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.'" 
I cannot express the dismay which this aspiration 
gave me, the horror with which I anticipated such 
a nunc dimittis. I felt like a small and solitary 
bird, caught and hung out hopelessly and end- 
lessly in a great ghttering cage. The clearness 
of the personal image affected me as all the texts 
and prayers and predictions had failed to do. I 
saw myself imprisoned forever in the rehgious 
system which had caught me and would whirl my 
helpless spirit as in the concentric wheels of my 
nightly vision. I did not struggle against it, be- 
217 



FATHER AND SON 

cause I believed that it was inevitable, and that 
there was no other way of making peace with the 
terrible and ever- watchful ''God who is a jealous 
God." But I looked forward to my fate without 
zeal and without exhilaration, and the fear of the 
Lord altogether swallowed up and cancelled any 
notion of the love of Him. 

I should do myself an injustice, however, if I 
described my attitude to faith at this time as 
wanting in candour. I did very earnestly desire 
to follow where my Father led. That passion for 
imitation, which I have already discussed, was 
strongly developed at this time, and it induced 
me to repeat the language of pious books in godly 
ejaculations which greatly edified my grown-up 
companions, and were, so far as I can judge, per- 
fectly sincere. I wished extremely to be good 
and holy, and I had no doubt in my mind of the 
absolute infallibility of my Father as a guide in 
heavenly things. But I am perfectly sure that 
there never was a moment in which my heart truly 
responded, with native ardour, to the words which 
flowed so readily, in such a stream of unction, 
from my anointed lips. I cannot recall anything 
but an intellectual surrender; there was never 
joy in the act of resignation, never the mystic's 
rapture at feeling his phantom self, his own 
threadbare soul, suffused, thrilled through, robed 
218 



FATHER AND SON 

again in glory by a fire which burns up everj^hing 
personal and individual about him. 

[^Through thick and thin I clung to a hard nut of 
individuality, deep down in my childish nature. 
To the pressure from without, I resigned every- 
thing else, my thoughts, my words, my anticipa- 
tions, my assurances, but there was something 
which I never resigned, my innate and persistent 
self. Meek as I seemed, and gently respondent, 
I was always conscious of that innermost quahty 
which I had learned to recognise in my earlier 
days in Islington, that existence of two in the 
depths who could speak to one another in invio- 
lable secrecy. 

''This a natural man may discourse of, and 
that very knowingly, and give a kind of natural 
credit to it, as to a history that may be true ; but 
firmly to believe that there is divine truth in 
all these things, and to have a persuasion of it 
stronger than of the very thing we see with our 
eyes; such an assent as this is the peculiar work 
of the Spirit of God, and is certainly saving faith." 
This passage is not to be found in the writings of 
any extravagant Plymouth Brother, but in one 
of the most sohd classics of the Church, in Arch- 
bishop Leighton's ''Commentary on the First 
Epistle of Peter." I quote it because it defines, 
more exactly than words of my own could hope 
219 



FATHER AND SON 

to do, the difference which ah-eady existed, and 
in secrecy began forthwith to be more and more 
acutely accentuated, between my Father and 
myself. He did indeed possess this saving faith, 
which could move mountains of evidence, and 
suffer no diminution under the action of failure 
or disappointment. I, on the other hand— as I 
began to feel dimly then, and see luminously now 
— had only acquired the habit of giving what 
the Archbishop means by '^a kind of natural 
credit" to the doctrine so persistently impressed 
upon my conscience, as could not but be molten 
in the dews and exhaled in the sunshine of hfe 
and thought and experience. 

My Father, by an indulgent act for the caprice 
of which I cannot wholly account, presently let 
in a flood of imaginative light which was certainly 
hostile to my heavenly calling. My instinctive 
interest in geography has already been mentioned. 
This was the one branch of knowledge in which 
I needed no instruction, geographical information 
seeming to soak into the cells of my brain without 
an effort. At the age of eleven, I knew a great 
deal more of maps, and of the mutual relation 
of locahties all over the globe, than most grown- 
up people do. It was almost a mechanical ac- 
quirement. I was now greatly taken with the 
geography of the West Indies, of every part of 
220 



FATHER AND SON 

which I had made MS. maps. There was some- 
thing powerfully attractive to my fancy in the 
great chain of the Antilles, l3dng on the sea like an 
open bracelet, with its big jewels and httle jewels 
strung on an invisible thread. I liked to shut my 
eyes and see it all, in a mental panorama, stretched 
from Cape Sant' Antonio to the Serpent's Mouth. 
Several of these lovely islands, these emeralds and 
amethysts set on the Caribbean Sea, my Father 
had known well in his youth, and I was importu- 
nate in questioning him about them. One day 
as I multiplied inquiries, he rose, as I did so, in 
his impetuous way, and climbing to the top of a 
bookcase, brought down a thick volume and pre- 
sented it to me. "You'll find all about the 
Antilles there," he said, and left me with "Tom 
Cringle's Log" in my possession. 

The embargo laid upon every species of fiction 
by my Mother's powerful scruple had never been 
raised, although she had been dead four years. 
As I have said in an earlier chapter, this was a 
point on which I believe that my Father had 
never entirely agreed with her. He had, how- 
ever, jdelded to her prejudice, and no work of 
romance, no fictitious story, had ever come in my 
way. It is remarkable that among our books, 
which amounted to many hundreds, I had never 
discovered a single work of fiction until my 
221 



FATHER AND SON 

Father himself revealed the existence of Michael 
Scott's wild masterpiece. So little did I imder- 
stand what was allowable in the way of literary 
invention, that I began the story without a doubt 
that it was true, and I think it was my Father 
himself who, in answer to an inquiry, explained 
to me that it was ''all made up." He advised me 
to read the description of the sea, and of the 
moimtains of Jamaica, and ''skip" the pages 
which gave imaginary adventures and conversa- 
tions. But I did not take his counsel; these 
latter were the flower of the book to me. I had 
never read, never dreamed of anything like them, 
and they filled my whole horizon with glory and 
with joy. 

I suppose that when my Father was a younger 
man, and less pietistic, he had read "Tom Crin- 
gle's Log" with pleasure, because it recalled 
familiar scenes to him. Much was explained by 
the fact that the frontispiece of this edition was 
a delicate line-engraving of Blewfields, the great 
lonely house in a garden of Jamaican allspice 
where for eighteen months he had lived as a 
naturalist. He could not look at this print with- 
out recalling exquisite memories and airs that 
blew from a terrestrial paradise. But Michael 
Scott's noisy amorous novel of adventure was an 
extraordinary book to put in the hands of a child 
222 



FATHER AND SON 

who had never been allowed to glance at the 
mildest and most febrifugal story-book. 

It was Hke giving a glass of brandy neat to some 
one who had never been weaned from a milk diet. 
I have not read ^'Tom Cringle's Log" from that 
day to this, and I think that I should be unwilling 
now to break the charm of memory, which may 
be largely illusion. But I remember a great deal 
of the plot and not a httle of the language, and, 
while I am sure it is enchantingly spirited, I am 
quite as sure that the persons it describes were far 
from being unspotted by the world. The scenes 
at night in the streets of Spanish Town surpassed 
not merely my experience, but, thank goodness, 
my imagination. The nautical personages used 
in their conversations what is called "sl class of 
language," and there ran, if I am not mistaken, 
a glow and gust of life through the romance 
from beginning to end which was nothing if it 
was not resolutely pagan. 

There were certain scenes and images in ^'Tom 
Cringle's Log" which made not merely a lasting 
impression upon my mind, but tinged my out- 
look upon life. The long adventures, fightings 
and escapes, sudden storms without, and mutinies 
within, drawn forth as they were, surely with great 
skill, upon the fiery blue of the boundless tropical 
ocean, produced on my inner mind a sort of glim- 
223 



FATHER AND SON 

mering hope, very vaguely felt at first, slowly 
developing, long stationary and faint, but always 
tending towards a belief that I should escape at 
last from the narrowness of the life we led at 
home, from this bondage to the Law and the 
Prophets. 

I must not define too clearly, or endeavour 
too formally to insist on the bhnd movements 
of a childish mind. But of this I am quite 
sure, that the reading and re-reading of ''Tom 
Cringle's Log" did more than anything else, in 
this critical eleventh year of my fife, to give 
fortitude to my individuality, which was in great 
danger — as I now see — of succumbing to the press- 
ure my Father brought to bear upon it from all 
sides. My soul was shut up, hke Fatima, in a 
tower to which no external influences could come, 
and it might really have been starved to death, 
or have lost the power of recovery and rebound, 
if my captor, by some freak not yet perfectly 
accounted for, had not gratuitously opened a 
little window in it and added a powerful telescope. 
The daring chapters of Michael Scott's picaresque 
romance of the tropics were that telescope and 
that window. 

In the spring of this year, I began to walk about 
the village and even proceed for considerable 
distances into the country by myself, and after 
224 



FATHER AND SON 

reading ''Tom Cringle's Log" those expeditions 
were accompanied by a constant hope of meeting 
with some adventures. I did not court events, 
however, except in fancy, for I was very shy of 
real people, and would break off some gallant 
dream of prowess on the high seas to bolt into a 
field and hide behind the hedge, while a couple 
of labouring men went by. Sometimes, however, 
the wave of a great purpose would bear me on, 
as when once, but certainly at an earlier date 
than I have now reached, hearing the dangers of 
a persistent drought much dwelt upon, I carried 
my small red watering-pot, full of water, up to 
the top of the village, and then all the way down 
Petit-tor Lane, and discharged its contents in 
a cornfield, hoping by this act to improve the 
prospects of the harvest. A more eventful ex- 
cursion must be described, because of the moral 
impression it left indelibly upon me. 

I have described the sequestered and beautiful 
hamlet of Barton, to which I was so often taken 
visiting by Mary Grace Burmington. At Barton 
there lived a couple who were objects of peculiar 
interest to me, because of the rather odd fact 
that having come, out of pure curiosity, to see 
me baptized, they had been then and there deeply 
convinced of their spiritual danger. These were 
John Brooks, an Irish quarryman, and his wife, 
225 



FATHER AND SON 

Ann Brooks. These people had not merely been 
hitherto unconverted, but they had openly treated 
the Brethren with anger and contempt. They 
came, indeed, to my baptism to mock, but they 
went away impressed. 

Next morning, when Mrs. Brooks was at the 
wash-tub, as she told us. Hell opened at her 
feet, and the Devil came out holding a long 
scroll on which the hst of her sins was written. 
She was so much excited, that the emotion brought 
about a miscarriage and she was seriously ill. 
Meanwhile, her husband, who had been equally 
moved at the baptism, was also converted, and as 
soon as she was well enough, they were baptized 
together, and then ''broke bread" with us. The 
case of the Brookses was much talked about, 
and was attributed, in a distant sense, to me; 
that is to say, if I had not been an object of public 
curiosity, the Brookses might have remained in 
the bond of iniquity. I, therefore, took a very 
particular interest in them, and as I presently 
heard that they were extremely poor, I was filled 
with a fervent longing to minister to their neces- 
sities. 

Somebody had lately given me a present of 

money, and I begged little sums here and there 

until I reached the very considerable figure of 

seven shillings and sixpence. With these coins 

226 



FATHER AND SON 

safe in a little linen bag, I started one Sunday 
afternoon, without saying anything to any one, 
and I arrived at the Brookses' cottage in Barton. 
John Brooks was a heavy dirty man, with a 
pock-marked face and two left legs; his broad 
and red face carried small side-whiskers in the 
manner of that day, but was otherwise shaved. 
When I reached the cottage, husband and wife 
were at home, doing nothing at all in the approved 
Sunday style. I was received by them with some 
surprise, but I quickly explained my mission, and 
produced my hnen bag. To my disgust, all John 
Brooks said was, ''I know'd the Lord would pro- 
vide," and after emptying my little bag into the 
palm of an enormous hand, he swept the contents 
into his trousers pocket, and slapped his leg. 
He said not one single word of thanks or ap- 
preciation, and I was absolutely cut to the 
heart. 

I think that in the course of a long life I have 
never experienced a bitterer disappointment. The 
woman, who was quicker, and more sensitive, 
doubtless saw my embarrassment, but the form 
of comfort which she chose was even more wound- 
ing to my pride. ''Never mind, little master," 
she said, "you shall come and see me feed the 
pigs." But there is a hmit to endurance, and 
with a sense of having been cruelly torn by the 
227 



FATHER AND SON 

tooth of ingratitude, I fled from the threshold of 
the Brookses, never to return. 

At tea that afternoon, I was very much down- 
cast, and, imder cross-examination from Miss 
Marks, all my Httle story came out. My Father, 
who had been floating away in a meditation, as 
he very often did, caught a word that interested 
him and descended to consciousness. I had to 
tell my tale over again, this time very sadly, and 
with a fear that I should be reprimanded. But 
on the contrary, both my Father and Miss Marks 
were attentive and most sympathetic, and I was 
much comforted. "We must remember they are 
the Lord's children," said my Father. "Even 
the Lord can't make a silk purse out of a sov;'s 
ear," said Miss Marks, who was considerably ruf- 
fled. "Alas! alas!" replied my Father, waving 
his hand with a deprecating gesture. "The dear 
child!" said Miss Marks, bristling with indigna- 
tion, and patting my hand across the tea-table. 
"The Lord will reward your zealous loving care 
of his poor, even if they have neither the grace 
nor the knowledge to thank you," said my Father, 
and rested his brown eyes meltingly upon me. 
"Brutes!" said Miss Marks, thinking of John and 
Mary Brooks. "Oh no! no!" rephed my Father, 
"but hewers of wood and drawers of water! We 
must bear with the limited intelligence." All 
228 



FATHER AND SON 

this was an emollient to my wounds, and I be- 
came consoled. But the springs of benevolence 
were dried up within me, and to this day I have 
never entirely recovered from the shock of John 
Brooks's coarse leer and his ^^I know'd the Lord 
would provide." The infant plant of philanthropy 
was burned in my bosom as if by quick-lime. 

In the course of the summer, a young school- 
master called on my Father to announce to him 
that he had just opened a day-school for the sons 
of gentlemen in our vicinity, and he begged for 
the favour of a visit. My Father returned his 
call; he lived in one of the small white villas, 
buried in laurels, which gave a discreet anima- 
tion to our neighbourhood. Mr. M. was frank 
and modest, deferential to my Father's opinions 
and yet capable of defending his own. His 
school and he produced an excellent impression, 
and in August I began to be one of his pupils. 
The school was very informal; it was held in 
the two principal dwelling-rooms on the ground- 
floor of the villa, and I do not remember that Mr. 
M. had any help from an usher. 

There were perhaps twenty boys in the school 
at most, and often fewer. I made the excursion 
between home and school four times a day; if I 
walked fast, the transit might take five minutes, 
and, as there were several objects of interest in the 
229 



FATHER AND SON 

way, it might be spread over an hour. In fine 
weather the going to and from school was very 
dehghtful, and small as the scope of it was, it 
could be varied almost indefinitely. I would 
sometimes meet with a schoolfellow proceeding 
in the same direction, and my Father, observing 
us over the wall one morning, was amused to 
notice that I always progressed by dancing along 
the curbstone sideways, my face turned inwards 
and my arms beating against my legs, conversing 
loudly all the time. This was a case of pure 
heredity, for so he used to go to his school, forty 
years before, along the streets of Poole. 

One day when fortunately I was alone, I was 
accosted by an old gentleman, dressed as a 
dissenting minister. He was pleased with my 
replies, and he presently made it a habit to be tak- 
ing his constitutional when I was likely to be on 
the high road. We became great friends, and he 
took me at last to his house, a very modest place, 
where to my great amazement, there hung in the 
dining-room, two large portraits, one of a man, 
the other of a woman, in extravagant fancy-dress. 
My old friend told me that the former was a picture 
of himself as he had appeared, ''long ago, in my 
unconverted days, on the stage." 

I was so ignorant as not to have the slightest 
conception of what was meant by the stage, and he 
230 



FATHER AND SON 

explained to me that he had been an actor and a 
poet, before the Lord had opened his eyes to better 
things. I knew nothing about actors, but poets 
were ah^eady the objects of my veneration. My 
friend was the first poet I had ever seen. He was 
no less a person than James Sheridan Knowles, 
the famous author of Virginius and The Hunch- 
hack, who had become a Baptist minister in his 
old age. When, at home, I mentioned this ac- 
quaintance, it awakened no interest. I beheve 
that my Father had never heard, or never noticed 
the name of one who had been by far the most 
eminent English playwright of that age. 

It was from Sheridan Knowles' lips that I 
first heard fall the name of Shakespeare. He 
was surprised, I fancy, to find me so curiously 
advanced in some branches of knowledge, and 
so utterly ignorant of others. He could hardly 
credit that the names of Hamlet and Falstaff 
and Prospero meant nothing to a little boy who 
knew so much theology and geography as I did. 
Mr. Knowles suggested that I should ask my 
schoolmaster to read some of the plays of Shake- 
speare with the boys, and he proposed The 
Merchant of Venice as particularly well-suited for 
this purpose. I repeated what my aged friend 
(Mr. Sheridan Knowles must have been nearly 
eighty at that time) had said, and Mr. M. accepted 
231 



FATHER AND SON 

the idea with promptitude. (All my memories 
of this my earliest schoolmaster present him to 
me as inteUigent, amiable and quick, although I 
think not very soundly prepared for his profes- 
sion.) 

Accordingly, it was announced that the read- 
ing of Shakespeare would be one of our les- 
sons, and on the following afternoon we began 
The Merchant of Venice. There was one large 
volume, and it was handed about the class ; I was 
permitted to read the part of Bassanio, and I 
set forth, with ecstatic pipe, how 

In Belmont is a lady richly left; 

And she is fair, and fairer than that word! 

Mr. M. must have had some fondness for the 
stage himself; his pleasure in the Shakespeare 
scenes was obvious, and nothing else that he 
taught me made so much impression on me as 
what he said about a proper emphasis in reading 
aloud. I was in the seventh heaven of delight, 
but alas! we had only reached the second act of 
the play, when the readings mysteriously stopped. 
I never knew the cause, but I suspect that it 
was at my Father's desire. He prided himself on 
never having read a page of Shakespeare, and 
on never having entered a theatre but once. I 
think I must have spoken at home about the 
232 



FATHER AND SON 

readings, and that he must have given the school- 
master a hint to return to the ordinary school 
curriculum. 

The fact that I was "sl behever/' as it was our 
custom to call one who had been admitted to 
the arcana of our rehgion, and that therefore, in 
all commerce with ^^unbehevers," it was my duty 
to be 'testifying for my Lord, in season and out 
of season," — this prevented my forming any 
intimate friendships at my first school. I shrank 
from the toilsome and embarrassing act of button- 
hohng a school-fellow as he rushed out of class, 
and of pressing upon him the probably unintelligi- 
ble question ''Have you found Jesus?" It was 
simpler to avoid him, to slip like a lizard through 
the laurels and emerge into sohtude. 

The boys had a way of plunging out into the 
road in front of the school-villa when afternoon 
school was over; it was a pleasant rural road 
lined with high hedges and shadowed by elm- trees. 
Here, especially towards the summer twilight, they 
used to linger and play vague games, swooping 
and whirling in the declining sunshine, and I 
used to join these bat-hke sports. But my com- 
pany, though not avoided, was not greatly sought 
for. I think that something of my curious 
history was known, and that I was, not unkindly, 
but instinctively, avoided, as an animal of a 
233 



FATHER AND SON 

different species, not allied to the herd. The 
conventionality of little boys is constant; the 
colour of their traditions is uniform. At the 
same time, although I made no friends, I found 
no enemies. In class, except in my extraordinary 
aptitude for geography, which was looked upon 
as incomprehensible and almost uncanny, I was 
rather behind than in front of the others. I, 
therefore, awakened no jealousies, and, intent 
on my own dreams, I think my little shadowy 
presence escaped the notice of most of my school- 
fellows. 

By the side of the road I have mentioned, be- 
tween the school and my home, there was a large 
horse-pond. The hedge folded round three sides 
of it, while ancient pollard elms bent over it, and 
chequered with their foliage in it the reflection 
of the sky. The roadside edge of this pond was 
my favourite station; it consisted of a hard clay 
which could be moulded into fairly tenacious 
forms. Here I created a maritime empire — 
islands, a seaboard with harbours, lighthouses, 
fortifications. My geographical imitativeness had 
its full swing. Sometimes, while I was creating, 
a cart would be driven roughly into the pond, 
and a horse would drink deep of my ocean, his 
hooves trampling my archipelagoes and shattering 
my ports with what was worse than a typhoon. 
234 



FATHER AND SON 

But I immediately set to work, as soon as the 
cart was gone and the mud had settled, to tidy 
up my coast-line again and to scoop out anew 
my harbours. 

My pleasure in this sport was endless, and 
what I was able to see, in my mind's eye, was 
not the edge of a morass of mud, but a splen- 
did line of coast, and gulfs of the type of 
Tor Bay. I do not recollect a sharper double 
humiliation than when old Sam Lamble, the 
blacksmith, who was one of the '^ saints," being 
asked by my Father whether he had met me, 
rephed '^Yes, I zeed 'un up-long, making mud 
pies in the ro-ad!" What a position for one who 
had been received into communion '^as an adult!" 
What a blot on the scutcheon of a would-be 
Columbus! ''Mud-pies," indeed! 

Yet I had an appreciator. One afternoon, as 
I was busy on my geographical operations, a 
good-looking middle-aged lady, with a soft pink 
cheek and a sparkling hazel eye, paused and asked 
me if my name was not what it was. I had seen 
her before; a stranger to our parts, with a voice 
without a trace in it of the Devonshire drawl. 
I knew, dimly, that she came sometimes to the 
meeting, that she was lodging at Upton with 
some friends of ours who accepted paying guests 
in an old house that was simply a basket of roses. 
235 



FATHER AND SON 

She was Miss Brightwen, and I now conversed 
with her for the first time. 

Her interest in my harbours and islands was 
marked; she did not smile; she asked questions 
about my peninsulas which were intelligent and 
pertinent. I was even persuaded at last to leave 
my creations and to walk with her towards the 
village. I was pleased with her voice, her refine- 
ment, her dress, which was more delicate, and 
her manners, which were more easy, than what I 
was accustomed to. We had some very pleasant 
conversation, and when we parted I had the sat- 
isfaction of feeling that our intercourse had been 
both agreeable to me and instructive to her. I 
told her that I should be glad to tell her more 
on a future occasion; she thanked me very 
gravely, and then she laughed a little. I con- 
fess I did not see that there was anything to 
laugh at. We parted on warm terms of mutual 
esteem, but I httle thought that this sympathetic 
Quakerish lady was to become my stepmother. 



236 



CHAPTER X 

I SLEPT in a little bed in a corner of the room, 
and my Father in the ancestral four-poster nearer 
to the door. Very early one bright September 
morning at the close of my eleventh year, my 
Father called me over to him. I chmbed up, and 
was snugly wrapped in the coverhd; and then 
we held a momentous conversation. It began 
abruptly by his asking me whether I should hke 
to have a new mamma. I was never a senti- 
mentalist, and I therefore answered, cannily, that 
that would depend on who she was. He parried 
this, and announced that, any way, a new mamma 
was coming; I was sure to like her. Still in a 
non-committal mood, I asked: ''Will she go with 
me to the back of the Ume-kihi?" This question 
caused my Father a great bewilderment. I had 
to explain that the ambition of my life was to 
go up behind the lime-kiln on the top of the hill 
that hung over Barton, a spot which was for- 
bidden ground, being locally held one of extreme 
237 



FATHER AND SON 

danger. ''Oh! I daresay she will," my Father 
then said, "but you must guess who she is." I 
guessed one or two of the less comely of the 
female ''saints," and, this embarrassing my 
Father, since the second I mentioned was a mar- 
ried woman who kept a sweet-shop in the village, 
he cut my inquiries short by saying, "It is Miss 
Bright wen." 

So far so good, and I was well pleased. But 
unfortunately I remembered that it was my duty 
to testify "in season and out of season." I there- 
fore asked, with much earnestness, "But, Papa, 
is she one of the Lord's children?" He replied, 
with gravity, that she was. "Has she taken up 
her cross in baptism?" I went on, for this was 
my own strong point as a behever. My Father 
looked a little shame-faced, and repHed: "Well, 
she has not as yet seen the necessity of that, but 
we must pray that the Lord may make her way 
clear before her. You see, she has been brought 
up, hitherto, in the so-called Church of England." 

Our positions were now curiously changed. It 
seemed as if it were I who was the jealous monitor, 
and my Father the deprecating penitent. I sat 
up in the coverlid, and I shook a finger at him. 
"Papa," I said, "don't tell me that she's a pedo- 
baptist?" I had lately acquired that valuable 
word, and I seized this remarkable opportunity 
238 



FATHER AND SON 

of using it. It affected my Father painfully, but 
he repeated his assurance that if we united our 
prayers, and set the Scripture plan plainly before 
Miss Brightwen, there could be no doubt that 
she would see her way to accepting the doctrine 
of adult baptism. And he said we must judge 
not, lest we ourselves be judged. I had just 
enough tact to let that pass, but I was quite 
aware that our whole system was one of judging, 
and that we had no intention whatever of being 
judged ourselves. Yet even at the age of eleven 
one sees that on certain occasions to press home 
the truth is not convenient. 

Just before Christmas, on a piercing night of 
frost, my Father brought to us his bride. The 
smartening up of the house, the new furniture, 
the removal of my own possessions to a private 
bed-room, the wedding gifts of the "saints," all 
these things paled in interest before the fact that 
Miss Marks had made a ''scene," in the course 
of the afternoon. I was dancing about the 
drawing-room, and was saying: ''Oh! I am so 
glad my new Mamma is coming," when Miss 
Marks called out, in an unnatural voice, "Oh! 
you cruel child." I stopped in amazement and 
stared at her, whereupon she threw prudence to 
the winds, and moaned: "I once thought I should 
be your dear manama." I was simply stupefied, 
239 



FATHER AND SON 

and I expressed my horror in terms that were 
clear and strong. Thereupon Miss Marks had 
a wild fit of hysterics, while I looked on, wholly 
ims3niipathetic and still deeply affronted. She 
was right; I was cruel, alas! but then, what a 
silly woman she had been! The consequence was 
that she withdrew in a moist and quivering con- 
dition to her boudoir, where she had locked her- 
self in when I, all smiles and caresses, was wel- 
coming the bride and bridegroom on the doorstep 
as pohtely as if I had been a valued old family 
retainer. 

My step-mother immediately became a great 
ally of mine. She was never a tower of strength 
to me, but at least she was always a lodge in my 
garden of cucumbers. She was a very well- 
meaning pious lady, but she was not a fanatic, 
and her mind did not naturally revel in spiritual 
aspirations. Almost her only social fault was 
that she was sometimes a little fretful; this was 
the way in which her bruised individuality asserted 
itself. But she was affectionate, serene, and 
above all refined. Her refinement was extraordi- 
narily pleasant to my nerves, on which much 
else in our surroundings jarred. 

How fife may have jarred, poor insulated lady, 
on her during her first experience of our life at 
the Room, I know not, but I think she was a 
240 



FATHER AND SON 

philosopher. She had, with surprising rashness, 
and in opposition to the wishes of every member 
of her own family, taken her cake, and now she 
recognised that she must eat it, to the last crumb. 
Over her wishes and prejudices my Father exer- 
cised a constant, cheerful and quiet pressure. He 
was never unkind or abrupt, but he went on 
adding avoirdupois until her will gave way under 
the sheer weight. Even to pubKc immersion, 
which, as was natural in a shy and sensitive lady 
of advancing years, she regarded with a horror 
which was long insurmountable, — even to baptism 
she yielded, and my Father had the joy to an- 
noimce to the Saints one Simday morning at the 
breaking of bread that ''my beloved wife has been 
able at length to see the Lord's Will in the matter 
of baptism, and will testify to the faith which is 
in her on Thursday evening next." No wonder 
my step-mother was sometimes fretful. 

On the physical side, I owe her an endless 
debt of gratitude. Her relations, who objected 
strongly to her marriage, had told her, among 
other pleasant prophecies, that ''the first thing 
you will have to do will be to bury that poor 
child." Under the old-world sway of Miss Marks, 
I had slept beneath a load of blankets, had never 
gone out save weighted with great coat and 
comforter, and had been protected from fresh 
241 



FATHER AND SON 

air as if from a pestilence. With real courage my 
step-mother reversed all this. My bed-room win- 
dow stood wide open all night long, wraps were 
done away with, or exchanged for flannel garments 
next the skin, and I was m-ged to be out and 
about as much as possible. 

All the quidnuncs among the '' saints" shook 
their heads; Mary Grace Burmington, a little 
embittered by the downfall of her Marks, made 
a solemn remonstrance to my Father, who, how- 
ever, allowed my step-mother to carry out her 
excellent plan. My health responded rapidly to 
this change of regime, but increase of health did 
not bring increase of spirituality. My Father, 
fully occupied with moulding the will and inflam- 
ing the piety of my step-mother, left me now, to 
a degree not precedented, in undisturbed posses- 
sion of my own devices. I did not lose my faith, 
but many other things took a prominent place in 
my mind. 

It will, I suppose, be admitted that there is 
no greater proof of complete religious sincerity 
than fervour in private prayer. If an individual, 
alone by the side of his bed, prolongs his inter- 
cessions, lingers wrestling with his divine Com- 
panion, and will not leave off until he has what 
he beUeves to be evidence of a reply to his en- 
treaties — then, no matter what the character of 
242 



FATHER AND SON 

his public protestations, or what the frailty of his 
actions, it is absolutely certain that he beUeves 
in what he professes. 

My Father prayed in private in what I may 
almost call a spirit of violence. He entreated for 
spiritual guidance with nothing less than impor- 
tunity. It might be said that he stormed the 
citadels of God's grace, refusing to be baffled, 
urging his intercessions without mercy upon a 
Deity who sometimes struck me as inattentive 
to his prayers or wearied by them. My Father's 
acts of supplication, as I used to witness them 
at night, when I was supposed to be asleep, 
were accompanied by stretchings out of the 
hands, by crackings of the joints of the fingers, 
by deep breathings, by murmurous sounds which 
seemed just breaking out of silence, like Virgil's 
bees out of the hive, magnis damorihus. My 
Father fortified his religious Hfe by prayer as an 
athlete does his physical life by lung-gymnastics 
and vigorous rubbings. 

It was a trouble to my conscience that I could 
not emulate this fervour. The poverty of my 
prayers had now long been a source of distress 
to me, but I could not discover how to enrich 
them. My Father used to warn us very solemnly 
against ''Hp-service," by which he meant singing 
hymns of experience and joining in ministrations 
243 



FATHER AND SON 

in which our hearts took no vital or personal 
part. This was an outward act, the tendency of 
which I could well appreciate, but there was a 
"hp-service" even more deadly than that, against 
which it never occurred to him to warn me. It 
assailed me when I had come alone by my bed- 
side, and had blown out the candle, and had 
sunken on my knees in my night-gown. Then 
it was that my deadness made itself felt, in the 
mechanical address I put up, the emptiness of 
my language, the absence of all real unction. 

I never could contrive to ask God for spiritual 
gifts in the same voice and spirit in which I could 
ask a human being for objects which I knew he 
could give me, and which I earnestly desired to 
possess. That sense of the reahty of intercession 
was for ever denied me, and it was, I now see, 
the stigma of my want of faith. But at the time, 
of course, I suspected nothing of the kind, and 
I tried to keep up my zeal by a desperate mental 
flogging, as if my soul had been a peg-top. 

In nothing did I gain from the advent of my 
step-mother more than in the encouragement she 
gave to my friendships with a group of boys of 
my own age, of whom I had now lately formed 
the acquaintance. These friendships she not 
merely tolerated, but fostered; it was even due 
to her kind arrangements that they took a certain 
241 



FATHER AND SON 

set form, that our excursions started from this 
house or from that on regular days. I hardly 
know by what stages I ceased to be a lonely httle 
creature of mock-monographs and mud-pies, and 
became a member of a sort of club of eight or ten 
active boys. The long summer hohdays of 1861 
were set in an enchanting brightness. 

Looking back, I cannot see a cloud on the 
terrestrial horizon — I see nothing but a blaze of 
sunshine; descents of slippery grass to moons of 
snow-white shingle, cold to the bare flesh; red 
promontories running out into a sea that was like 
sapphire; and our happy clan climbing, bathing, 
boating, lounging, chattering, all the hot day 
through. Once more I have to record the fact, 
which I think is not without interest, that pre- 
cisely as my life ceases to be solitary, it ceases to 
be distinct. I have no difficulty in recalling, with 
the minuteness of a photograph, scenes in which 
my Father and I were the sole actors within the 
four walls of a room, but of the glorious hfe 
among wild boys on the margin of the sea I have 
nothing but vague and broken impressions, deli- 
cious and illusive. 

It was a remarkable proof of my Father's 

temporary lapse into indulgence that he made 

no effort to thwart my intimacy with these my 

new companions. He was in an unusually humane 

245 



FATHER AND SON 

mood himself. His marriage was one proof of 
it; another was the composition at this time of 
the most picturesque, easy and graceful of all 
his writings, ''The Romance of Natural History," 
even now a sort of classic. Everything combined 
to make him beheve that the blessing of the Lord 
was upon him, and to clothe the darkness of the 
world with at least a mist of rose-colour. I do 
not recollect that ever at this time he bethought 
him, when I started in the morning for a long 
day with my friends on the edge of the sea, to 
remind me that I must speak to them, in season 
and out of season, of the Blood of Jesus. And I, 
young coward that I was, let sleeping dogmas he. 
My companions were not all of them the sons of 
saints in our communion; their parents belonged 
to that professional class which we were only 
now beginning to attract to our services. They 
were brought up in religious, but not in fanatical, 
families, and I was the only ''converted" one 
among them. Mrs. Paget, of whom I shall 
have presently to speak, characteristically said 
that it grieved her to see "one lamb among so 
many kids." But "kid" is a word of varied 
significance, and the symbol did not seem to us 
effectively applied. As a matter of fact, we made 
what I still feel was an excellent tacit compromise. 
My young companions never jeered at me for 
246 



FATHER AND SON 

being ''in communion with the saints," and I, on 
my part, never m'ged the Atonement upon them. 
I began, in fact, more and more to keep my own 
reUgion for use on Sundays. 

It will, I hope, have been observed that among 
the very curious grown-up people into whose 
company I was thrown, although many were 
frail and some were foohsh, none, so far as I can 
discern, were hypocritical. I am not one of 
those who beheve that hypocrisy is a vice that 
grows on every bush. Of course, in religious 
more than in any other matters, there is a per- 
petual contradiction between our thoughts and 
our deeds which is inevitable to our social order, 
and is bound to lead to ''cette tromperie mutuelle" 
of which Pascal speaks. But I have often won- 
dered, while admiring the splendid portrait of 
Tartufe, whether such a monster ever, or at least 
often, has walked the stage of life; whether 
Moliere observed, or only invented him. 

To adopt a scheme of rehgious pretension, with 
no belief whatever in its being true, merely for 
sensuous advantage, openly acknowledging to one's 
inner self the brazen system of deceit, — such a 
course may, and doubtless has been, trodden, 
yet surely much less frequently than cynics love 
to suggest. But at the juncture which I have 
now reached in my narrative, I had the advantage 
247 



FATHER AND SON 

of knowing a person who was branded before the 
whole world, and punished by the law of his 
country, as a felonious hypocrite. My Father 
himself could only sigh and admit the charge. 
And yet — I doubt. 

About half-way between our village and the 
town there lay a comfortable villa inhabited by 
a retired sohcitor, or perhaps attorney, whom I 
shall name Mr. Dormant. We often called at his 
half-way house, and, although he was a member 
of the town-meeting, he not unfrequently came 
up to us for 'Hhe breaking of bread." Mr. 
Dormant was a solid, pink man, of a cosy habit. 
He had beautiful white hair, a very soft voice, 
and a welcoming, wheedhng manner; he was 
extremely fluent and zealous in using the pious 
phraseology of the sect. My Father had never 
been very much attracted to him, but the man 
professed, and I think felt, an overwhelming ad- 
miration for my Father. Mr. Dormant was not 
very well off, and in the previous year he had 
persuaded an aged gentleman of wealth to come 
and board with him. When, in the course of 
the winter, this gentleman died, much surprise 
was felt at the report that he had left almost his 
entire fortune, which was not inconsiderable, to 
Mr. Dormant. 

Much surprise — for the old gentleman had a 
248 



FATHER AND SON 

son to whom he had always been warmly attached, 
who was far away, I think in South America, 
practising a perfectly respectable profession of 
which his father entirely approved. My own 
Father always preserved a dehcacy and a sense 
of honour about money which could not have 
been more sensitive if he had been an imgodly 
man, and I am very much pleased to remember 
that when the legacy was first spoken of, he re- 
gretted that Mr. Dormant should have allowed 
the old gentleman to make this will; if he knew 
the intention, my Father said, it would have 
shown a more proper sense of his responsibihty 
if he had dissuaded the testator from so unbe- 
coming a disposition. That was long before any 
legal question arose; and now Mr. Dormant 
came into his fortune, and began to make hand- 
some gifts to missionary societies, and to his own 
meeting in the town. If I do not mistake, he 
gave, unsohcited, a sum to our building fund, 
which my Father afterwards returned. But in 
process of time we heard that the son had come 
back from the Antipodes, and was making in- 
vestigations. Before we knew where we were, 
the news burst upon us, like a bomb-shell, that 
Mr. Dormant had been arrested on a criminal 
charge and was now in gaol at Exeter. 
Sympathy was at first much extended amongst 
249 



FATHER AND SON 

us to the prisoner. But it was lessened when we 
understood that the old gentleman had been 
''converted" while under Dormant's roof, and had 
given the fact that his son was ''an unbeUever" 
as a reason for disinheriting him. All doubt was 
set aside when it was divulged, under pressure, by 
the nurse who attended on the old gentleman, 
herself one of the "saints," that Dormant had 
traced the signature to the will by drawing the 
fingers of the testator over the document when 
he was already and finally comatose. 

My Father, setting aside by a strong effort of will 
the repugnance which he felt, visited the prisoner in 
gaol before this final evidence had been extracted. 
When he returned he said that Dormant appeared 
to be enjoying a perfect confidence of heart, and 
had expressed a sense of his joy and peace in the 
Lord; my Father regretted that he had not been 
able to persuade him to admit any error, even 
of judgment. But the prisoner's attitude in the 
dock, when the facts were proved, and not by him 
denied, was still more extraordinary. He could 
be induced to exhibit no species of remorse, and, 
to the obvious anger of the judge himself, stated 
that he had only done his duty as a Christian, in 
preventing this wealth from coming into the 
hands of an ungodly man, who would have spent 
it in the service of the flesh and of the devil. 
250 



FATHER AND SON 

Sternly reprimanded by the judge, he made the 
final statement that at that very moment he was 
conscious of his Lord's presence, in the dock at 
his side, whispering to him ''Well done, thou good 
and faithful servant!" In this frame of con- 
science, and with a glowing countenance, he was 
hurried away to penal servitude. 

This was a very painful incident, and it is easy 
to see how compromising, how cruel, it was in 
its effect upon our communion; what occasion 
it gave to our enemies to blaspheme. No one, 
in either meeting, could or would raise a voice 
to defend Mr. Dormant. We had to bow our 
heads when we met our enemies in the gate. 
The blow fell more heavily on the meeting of 
which he had been a prominent and communicat- 
ing member, but it fell on us too, and my Father 
felt it severely. For many years he would never 
mention the man's name, and he refused all dis- 
cussion of the incident. 

Yet I was never sure, and I am not sure now, 
that the wretched being was a hypocrite. There 
are as many vulgar fanatics as there are distin- 
guished ones, and I am not convinced that Dor- 
mant, coarse and narrow as he was, may not 
have sincerely believed that it was better for the 
money to be used in rehgious propaganda than 
in the pleasures of the world, of which he doubt- 
251 



FATHER AND SON 

less formed a very vague idea. On this affair I 
meditated much, and it awakened in my mind, 
for the first time, a doubt whether our exclusive 
system of ethics was an entirely salutary one, 
if it could lead the conscience of a believer 
to tolerate such acts as these, acts which my 
Father himself had denounced as dishonourable 
and disgraceful. 

My step-mother brought with her a Httle 
library of such books as we had not previously 
seen, but which yet were known to all the world 
except us. Prominent among these was a set 
of the poems of Walter Scott, and in his un- 
wonted geniality and provisional spirit of com- 
promise, my Father must do no less than read 
these works aloud to my step-mother in the quiet 
spring evenings. This was a sort of aftermath 
of courtship, a tribute of song to his bride, very 
sentimental and pretty. She would sit, sedately, 
at her work-box, while he, facing her, poured 
forth the verses at her like a blackbird. I was 
not considered in this arrangement, which was 
wholly matrimonial, but I was present, and the 
exercise made more impression upon me than it 
did upon either of the principal agents. 

My Father read the verse admirably, with a full, 
— some people (but not I) might say with too full 
— a perception of the metre as well as of the 
252 



FATHER AND SON 

rhythm, rolling out the rhymes, and glorying in 
the proper names. He began, and it was a happy 
choice, with ^^The Lady of the Lake." It gave 
me singular pleasure to hear his large voice do 
justice to '^Duncrannon" and "Cambus-Ken- 
neth," and wake the echoes with ''Roderigh Vich 
Alphine dhu, ho! ieroe!" I almost gasped with 
excitement, while a shudder floated down my 
backbone, when we came to: 



A sharp and shrieking echo gave, 
Coir-Uriskin, thy goblin cave! 
And the grey pass where birches wave, 
On Beala-nam-bo, 



a passage which seemed to me to achieve the 
ideal of subhme romance. My thoughts were 
occupied all day long with the adventures of 
Fitz James and the denizens of Ellen's Isle. It 
became an obsession, and when I was asked 
whether I remembered the name of the cottage 
where the minister of the Bible Christians lodged, 
I answered, dreamily, ''Yes, — Beala-nam-bo." 

Seeing me so much fascinated, thrown indeed 
into a temporary frenzy, by the epic poetry of 
Sir Walter Scott, my step-mother asked my 
Father whether I might not start reading the 
Waverley Novels. But he refused to permit this, 
on the ground that those tales gave false and 
253 



FATHER AND SON 

disturbing pictures of life, and would lead away 
my attention from heavenly things. I do not 
fully apprehend what distinction he drew between 
the poems, which he permitted, and the novels, 
which he refused. But I suppose he regarded a 
work in verse as more artificial, and therefore less 
likely to make a realistic impression, than one in 
prose. There is something quaint in the con- 
scientious scruple which allows ''The Lord of the 
Isles" and excludes ''Rob Roy." 

But, stranger still, and amounting almost to a 
whim, was his sudden decision that, although I 
might not touch the novels of Scott, I was free to 
read those of Dickens. I recollect that my step- 
mother showed some surprise at this, and that my 
Father explained to her that Dickens "exposes the 
passion of love in a ridiculous light." She did not 
seem to follow this recommendation, which indeed 
tends to the ultra-subtle, but she procured for me 
a copy of "Pickwick," by which I was instantly 
and gloriously enslaved. My shouts of laughing 
at the richer passages were almost scandalous, and 
led to my being reproved for disturbing my 
Father while engaged, in an upper room, in the 
study of God's Word. I must have expended 
months on the perusal of "Pickwick," for I used 
to rush through a chapter, and then read it 
over again very slowly, word for word, and then 
254 



FATHER AND SON 

shut my eyes to realise the figures and the 
action. 

I suppose no child will ever again enjoy that 
rapture of unresisting humorous appreciation of 
'Tickwick." I felt myself to be in the company 
of a gentleman so extremely funny that I began 
to laugh before he began to speak ; no sooner did 
he remark 'Hhe sky was dark and gloomy, the air 
was damp and raw," than I was in fits of laughter. 
My retirement in our sequestered corner of Ufe 
made me, perhaps, even in this matter, somewhat 
old-fashioned, and possibly I was the latest of 
the generation who accepted Mr. Pickwick with 
an unquestioning and hysterical abandonment. 
Certainly few young people now seem sensitive, 
as I was, and as thousands before me had been, 
to the quality of his fascination. 

It was curious that living in a household where 
a certain delicate art of painting was diligently 
cultivated, I had yet never seen a real picture, 
and was scarcely familiar with the design of one 
in engraving. My step-mother, however, brought 
a flavoiu- of the fine arts with her; a kind of 
aesthetic odour, like that of lavender, clung to her 
as she moved. She had known authentic artists 
in her youth ; she had watched Old Crome painting, 
and had taken a course of drawing-lessons from no 
less a person than Cotman. She painted small 
255 



FATHER AND SON 

water-colour landscapes herself, with a delicate 
economy of means and a graceful Norwich con- 
vention ; her sketch-books were filled with abbeys 
gently washed in, river-banks in sepia by which 
the elect might be dimly reminded of Liber Stu- 
diorum, and woodland scenes over which the ghost 
of Creswick had faintly breathed. It was not ex- 
citing art, but it was, so far as it went, in its lady- 
like reserve, the real thing. Our sea-anemones, 
our tropic birds, our bits of spongy rock frilled 
and sprayed with corallines, had been very con- 
scientious and skilful, but, essentially, so far as 
art was concerned, the wrong thing. 

Thus I began to acquire, without understanding 
the value of it, some conception of the elegant 
phases of early English water-colour painting, and 
there was one singular piece of a marble well 
brimming with water, and a greyish-blue sky 
over it, and dark-green poplars, shaped hke wet 
brooms, menacing the middle distance, which 
Cotman himself had touched; and this seemed 
beautiful and curious to me in its dim, flat frame, 
when it was hoisted to a place on our drawing- 
room wall. 

But still I had never seen a subject-picture, 

although my step-mother used to talk of the 

joys of the Royal Academy, and it was therefore 

with a considerable sense of excitement that I 

256 



FATHER AND SON 

went, with my Father, to examine Mr. Holman 
Himt's Finding of Christ in the Temple which at 
this time was announced to be on pubhc show 
at our neighbouring town. We paid our shilhngs 
and ascended with others to an upper room, bare 
of every disturbing object, in which a strong 
top-hght raked the large and uncompromising 
picture. We looked at it for some time in silence, 
and then my Father pointed out to me various 
details, such as the phylacteries and the mitres 
and the robes which distinguished the high 
priest. 

Some of the other visitors, as I recollect, ex- 
pressed astonishment and dislike of what they 
called the 'Treraphaehte" treatment, but we 
were not affected by that. Indeed, if anything, 
the exact, minute and hard execution of Mr. Hunt 
was in sympathy with the methods we ourselves 
were in the habit of using when we painted butter- 
flies and sea-weeds, placing perfectly pure pig- 
ments side by side, without any nonsense about 
chiaroscuro. This large, bright, comprehensive 
picture made a very deep impression upon me, not 
exactly as a work of art, but as a brilliant natural 
specimen. I was pleased to have seen it, as I was 
pleased to have seen the comet, and the whale 
which was brought to our front door on a truck. 
It was a prominent addition to my experience. 
257 



FATHER AND SON 

The slender expansions of my interest which 
were now budding hither and thither do not 
seem to have alarmed my Father at all. His 
views were short; if I appeared to be contented 
and obedient, if I responded pleasantly when 
he appealed to me, he was not concerned to dis- 
cover the source of my cheerfulness. He put 
it down to my happy sense of joy in Christ, a 
reflection of the sunshine of grace beaming upon 
me through no intervening clouds of sin or doubt. 
The ''saints" were, as a rule, very easy to com- 
prehend; their emotions lay upon the surface. 
If they were gay, it was because they had no 
burden on their consciences, while, if they were 
depressed, the symptom might be depended upon 
as showing that their consciences were troubling 
them, and if they were indifferent and cold, it 
was certain that they were losing their faith and 
becoming hostile to godliness. It was almost a 
mechanical matter with these simple souls. But, 
although I was so much younger, I was more 
complex and more crafty than the peasant 
''saints." My Father, not a very subtle psycholo- 
gist, applied to me the same formulas which served 
him well at the meeting, but in my case the re- 
sults were less uniformly successful. 

The excitement of school-life and the enlarge- 
ment of my circle of interests, combined to make 
258 



FATHER AND SON 

Sunday, by contrast, a very tedious occasion. 
The absence of every species of recreation on the 
Lord's Day grew to be a burden which might 
scarcely be borne. I have said that my freedom 
during the week had now become considerable; 
if I was at home punctually at meal-times, the 
rest of my leisure was not challenged. But this 
liberty, which in the summer hoUdays came to 
surpass that of ''fishes that tipple in the deep," 
was put into more and more painful contrast 
with the unbroken servitude of Sunday. 

My Father objected very strongly to the ex- 
pression Sabbath-day, as it is commonly used by 
Presbyterians and others. He said, quite justly, 
that it was an inaccurate modern innovation, that 
Sabbath was Saturday, the seventh day of the 
week, not the first, a Jewish festival and not a 
Christian commemoration. Yet his exaggerated 
view with regard to the observance of the First 
Day, namely, that it must be exclusively occupied 
with public and private exercises of divine wor- 
ship, was based much more upon a Jewish than 
upon a Christian law. In fact, I do not remem- 
ber that my Father ever produced a definite 
argument from the New Testament in support of 
his excessive passivity on the Lord's Day. He 
followed the early Puritan practice, except that 
he did not extend his observance, as I beUeve 
259 



FATHER AND SON 

the old Puritans did, from sunset on Saturday to 
sunset on Sunday. 

The observance of the Lord's day has already 
become universally so lax that I think there may 
be some value in preserving an accurate record 
of how our Sundays were spent five and forty 
years ago. We came down to breakfast at the 
usual time. My Father prayed briefly before we 
began the meal; after it, the bell was rung, and, 
before the breakfast was cleared away, we had 
a lengthy service of exposition and prayer with 
the servants. If the weather was fine, we then 
walked about the garden, doing nothing, for 
about half an hour. We then sat, each in a 
separate room, with our Bibles open and some 
conmaentary on the text beside us, and prepared 
our minds for the morning service. A little before 
11 A. M. we sallied forth, carrying our Bibles and 
hymn-books, and went through the morning-ser- 
vice of two hours at the Room; this was the 
central event of Sunday. 

We then came back to dinner, — curiously 
enough to a hot dinner, always, with a joint, 
vegetables and puddings, so that the cook at 
least must have been busily at work, — and 
after it my Father and my step-mother took 
a nap, each in a different room, while I slipped 
out into the garden for a Httle while, but never 
260 



FATHER AND SON 

venturing further afield. In the middle of the 
afternoon, my step-mother and I proceeded up 
the village to Sunday School, where I was early 
promoted to the tuition of a few very little boys. 
We returned in time for tea, immediately after 
which we all marched forth, again armed, as in 
the morning, with Bibles and hymn-books, and 
we went through the evening-service, at which my 
Father preached. The hour was now already past 
my week-day bed-time, but we had another 
service to attend, the Believers' Prayer Meeting, 
which commonly occupied forty minutes more. 
Then we used to creep home, I often so tired that 
the weariness was hke physical pain, and I was 
permitted, without further ''worship," to slip up- 
stairs to bed. 

What made these Sundays, the observance of 
which was absolutely uniform, so pecuharly try- 
ing was that I was not permitted the indulgence 
of any secular respite. I might not open a scien- 
tific book, nor make a drawing, nor examine a 
specimen. I was not allowed to go into the road, 
except to proceed with my parents to the Room, 
nor to discuss worldly subjects at meals, nor to 
enter the Httle chamber where I kept my treasures. 
I was hotly and tightly dressed in black, all day 
long, as though ready at any moment to attend 
a funeral with decorum. Sometimes, towards even- 
261 



FATHER AND SON 

ing, I used to feel the monotony and weariness 
of my position to be almost unendurable, but at 
this time I was meek, and I bowed to what I sup- 
posed to be the order of the universe. 



262 



CHAPTER XI 

As my mental horizon widened, my Father 
followed the direction of my spiritual eyes with 
some bewilderment, and knew not at what I 
gazed. Nor could I have put into words, nor can 
I even now define, the visions which held my 
vague and timid attention. As a child develops, 
those who regard it with tenderness or impatience 
are seldom even approximately correct in their 
analysis of its intellectual movements, largely be- 
cause, if there is anjrthing to record, it defies adult 
definition. One curious freak of mentality I 
must now mention, because it took a considerable 
part in the enfranchisement of my mind, or rather 
in the formation of my thinking habits. But 
neither my Father nor my step-mother knew what 
to make of it, and to tell the truth I hardly know 
what to make of it myself. 

Among the books which my new mother had 
brought with her were certain editions of the 
poets, an odd assortment. Campbell was there, 
263 



FATHER AND SON 

and Bums, and Keats, and the "Tales" of B)a"on. 
Each of these might have been expected to appeal 
to me; but my emotion was too young, and I 
did not Hsten to them yet. Their imperative 
voices called me later. By the side of these ro- 
mantic classics stood a small, thick volume, 
bound in black morocco, and comprising four re- 
printed works of the eighteenth century, gloomy, 
funereal poems of an order as wholly out of date 
as are the cross-bones and ruffled cherubim on 
the grave-stones in a country churchyard. The 
four — and in this order, as I never shall forget — 
were "The Last Day" of Dr. Young, Blair's 
"Grave," "Death" by Bishop Beilby Porteus, and 
"The Deity" of Samuel Boyse. These lugubrious 
effusions, all in blank verse or in the heroic couplet, 
represented, in its most redundant form, the 
artistic theology of the middle of the eighteenth 
century. They were steeped in such vengeful and 
hortatory sentiments as passed for elegant piety 
in the reign of George II. 

How I came to open this solemn volume is 
explained by the oppressive exclusiveness of our 
Sundays. On the afternoon of the Lord's Day, 
as I have already explained, I might neither walk, 
nor talk, nor explore our scientific Hbraiy, nor 
indulge in furious feats of water-colour painting. 
The Plymouth-Brother theology which alone was 
264 



FATHER AND SON 

open to me produced, at length, and particularly 
on hot afternoons, a faint physical nausea, a kind 
of secret headache. But, hitting one day upon 
the doleful book of verses, and observing its 
religious character, I asked ''May I read that?" 
and after a brief, astonished glance at the con- 
tents, I received ''0 certainly — if you can!" 

The lawn sloped directly from a verandah 
at our drawing-room window, and it contained 
two immense elm-trees, which had originally 
formed part of the hedge of a meadow. In our 
trim and polished garden they then remained 
— they were soon afterwards cut down — rude and 
obtuse, with something primeval about them, 
something autochthonous; they were like two 
peasant ancestors surviving in a family that had 
advanced to gentility. They rose each out of 
a steep turfed hillock, and the root of one of them 
was long my favourite summer reading-desk; for 
I could lie stretched on the lawn, with my head 
and shoulders supported by the elm-tree hillock, 
and the book in a fissure of the rough turf. 
Thither then I escaped with my grave-yard poets, 
and who shall explain the rapture with which I 
followed their austere morality? 

Whether I really read consecutively in my 
black-bound volume I can no longer be sure, but 
it became a companion whose society I valued, 
265 



FATHER AND SON 

and at worst it was a thousand times more con- 
genial to me than Jukes' ''On the Apocalypse" 
or than a perfectly excruciating work ambiguously 
styled ''The Javelin of Phineas/' which lay 
smouldering in a dull red cover on the drawing- 
room table. I dipped my bucket here and there 
into my poets, and I brought up strange things. 
I brought up out of the depths of "The Last Day " 
the following ejaculation of a soul roused by the 
trump of resurrection: — 

Father of mercies! Why from silent earth 
Didst thou awake, and curse me into birth? 
Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night, 
And make a thankless present of thy light? 
Push into being a reverse of thee. 
And animate a clod with misery? 

I read these lines with a shiver of excitement, 
and in a sense I suppose little intended by the 
sanctimonious rector of Welwyn. I also read in 
the same piece the surprising description of how 

Now charnels rattle, scattered limbs, and all 
The various bones, obsequious to the call, 
Self-mov'd, advance — the neck perhaps to meet 
The distant head, the distant legs the feet, 

but rejected it as not wholly supported by the 

testimony of Scripture. I think that the rhetoric 

and vigorous advance of Young's verse were pleas- 

266 



FATHER AND SON 

ant to me. Beilby Porteus I discarded from the 
first as impenetrable. In ^'The Deity/' — I knew 
nothing then of the hfe of its extravagant and 
preposterous author, — I took a kind of persistent, 
penitential pleasure, but it was Blair's ''Grave" 
that really delighted me, and I frightened myself 
with its melodious doleful images in earnest. 

About this time there was a great flow of tea- 
table hospitahty in the village, and my friends 
and their friends used to be asked out, by re- 
spective parents and by more than one amiable 
spinster, to faint little entertainments where those 
sang who were ambitious to sing, and where all 
played post and forfeits after a rich tea. My 
Father was constantly exercised in mind as to 
whether I should or should not accept these 
glittering invitations. There hovered before him 
a painful sense of danger in resigning the soul to 
pleasures which savoured of "the World." These, 
though apparently innocent in themselves, might 
give an appetite for yet more subversive dissipa- 
tions. 

I remember, on one occasion, when the Browns, 
a family of Baptists who kept a large haber- 
dashery shop in the neighbouring town, asked 
for the pleasure of my company 'Ho tea and 
games," and carried complacency so far as to 
offer to send that local vehicle "the midge," to 
267 



FATHER AND SON 

fetch me and bring me back, my Father's con- 
science was so painfully perplexed, that he de- 
sired me to come up with him to the now-deserted 
"boudoir" of the departed Marks, that we might 
"lay the matter before the Lord." We did so, 
kneehng side by side, with our backs to the win- 
dow and our foreheads pressed upon the horsehair 
cover of the small coffin-like sofa. My Father 
prayed aloud, with great fervour, that it might be 
revealed to me, by the voice of God, whether it 
was or was not the Lord's will that I should attend 
the Browns' party. My Father's attitude seemed 
to me to be hardly fair, since he did not scruple to 
remind the Deity of various objections to a Ufe of 
pleasure and of the snakes that lie hidden in the 
grass of evening parties. It would have been more 
scrupulous, I thought, to give no sort of hint of 
the kind of answer he desired and expected. 

It will be justly said that my life was made up 
of very trifling things, since I have to confess that 
this incident of the Browns' invitation was one 
of its landmarks. As I knelt, feeling very small, 
by the immense bulk of my Father, there gushed 
through my veins like a wine the determination 
to rebel. Never before, in all these years of my 
vocation, had I felt my resistance take precisely 
this definite form. We rose presently from the 
sofa, my forehead and the backs of my hands 
26S 



FATHER AND SON 

still chafed by the texture of the horsehair, and 
we faced one another in the dreary light. My 
Father, perfectly confident in the success of what 
had really been a sort of incantation, asked me 
in a loud wheedling voice, ''Well, and what is the 
answer which our Lord vouchsafes?" I said 
nothing, and so my Father, more sharply, con- 
tinued, ''We have asked Him to direct you to a 
true knowledge of His will. We have desired 
Him to let you know whether it is, or is not, in 
accordance with His wishes that you should ac- 
cept this invitation from the Browns." He posi- 
tively beamed down at me; he had no doubt of 
the reply. He was already, I believe, planning 
some little treat to make up to me for the material 
deprivation. But my answer came, in the high- 
piping accents of despair: "The Lord says I may 
go to the Browns." My Father gazed at me in 
speechless horror. He was caught in his own 
trap, and though he was certain that the Lord 
had said nothing of the kind, there was no road 
open for him but just sheer retreat. Yet surely 
it was an error in tactics to slam the door. 

It was at this party at the Browns' — to which 
I duly went, although in sore disgrace — that my 
charnel poets played me a mean trick. It was 
proposed that "our young friends" should give 
their elders the treat of repeating any pretty 
269 



FATHER AND SON 

pieces that they knew by heart. Accordingly a 
httle girl recited 'Tasabianca," and another httle 
girl ''We are Seven," and various children were 
induced to repeat hyinns, ''some rather long," as 
Calverley says, but all very mild and innocuously 
evangelical. I was then asked by Mrs. Brown's 
maiden sister, a gushing lady in corkscrew curls, 
who led the revels, whether I also would not in- 
dulge them "by repeating some sweet stanzas." 
No one more ready than I. Without a moment's 
hesitation, I stood forth, and in a loud voice I 
began one of my favourite passages from Blair's 
"Grave":— 

If death were nothing, and nought after death, — 

If when men died at once they ceased to be, — 

Returning to the barren Womb of Nothing 

Whence first they sprung, then might the debauchee 



"Thank you, dear, that will do nicely!" said 
the lady with the curls. "But that's only the 
beginning of it," I cried. "Yes, dear, but that 
will quite do! We won't ask you to repeat any 
more of it," and I withdrew to the borders of the 
company in bewilderment. Nor did the Browns 
or their visitors ever learn what it was the de- 
bauchee might have said or done in more favour- 
able circumstances. 

The growing eagerness which I displayed for 
270 



FATHER AND SON 

the society of selected school-fellows and for such 
gentle dissipations as were witliin my reach exer- 
cised my Father greatly. His fancy rushed for- 
ward with the pace of a steam-engine, and saw 
me the life and soul of a gambling club, or flaunting 
it at the Mabille. He had no confidence in the 
action of moderating powers, and he was fond 
of repeating that the downward path is easy. 
If one fretted to be bathing with one's companions 
on the shingle, and preferred this exercise to the 
study of God's Word, it was a symbol of a terrible 
decline, the angle of which would grow steeper 
and steeper, till one plunged into perdition. He 
was, himself, timid and reclusive, and he shrank 
from all avoidable companionship with others, 
except on the footing of a master and teacher. 
My step-mother and I, who neither taught nor 
ruled, yearned for a looser chain and fighter rela- 
tionships. With regard to myself, my Father 
about this time hit on a plan from which he hoped 
much, but from which little resulted. He looked 
to George to supply what my temperament 
seemed to require of congenial juvenile compan- 
ionship. 

If I have not mentioned ''George" until now, 
it is not that he was a new acquaintance. When 
we first came down into the country, our sym- 
pathy had been called forth by an accident to a 
271 



FATHER AND SON 

little boy, who was knocked over by a horse, and 
whose thigh was broken. Somebody (I suppose 
Mary Grace, since my Father could rarely bring 
himself to pay these public visits) went to see the 
child in the infirmary, and accidentally discovered 
that he was exactly the same age that I was. 
This, and the fact that he was a meditative and 
sober little boy, attracted us all still further to 
George, who became converted under one of my 
Father's sermons. He attended my pubhc bap- 
tism, and was so much moved by this ceremony 
that he passionately desired to be baptized also, 
and was in fact so immersed, a few months later, 
slightly to my chagrin, since I thereupon ceased 
to be the only infant prodigy in communion. 
When we were both in our thirteenth year, George 
became an out-door servant to us, and did odd 
jobs under the gardener. Mj?- Father, finding him, 
as he said, ''docile, obedient and engaging," 
petted George a good deal, and taught him a little 
botany. He called George, by a curious contor- 
tion of thought, my ''spiritual foster-brother," and 
anticipated for him, I think, a career, like mine, 
in the Ministry. 

Our garden suffered from an incursion of slugs, 

which laid the verbenas in the dust, and shore 

off the carnations as if with pairs of scissors. 

To cope with this plague we invested in a drake 

272 



FATHER AND SON 

and a duck, who were christened Philemon and 
Baucis. Every night large cabbage-leaves, con- 
taining the lees of beer, were spread about the 
flower-beds as traps, and at dawn these had 
become green parlours crammed with intoxicated 
slugs. One of George's earliest morning duties 
was to free Philemon and Baucis from their 
coop, and, armed with a small wand, to guide 
their footsteps to the feast in one cabbage-leaf 
after another. My Father used to watch this 
performance from an upper window, and in mo- 
ments of high facetiousness, he was wont to 
parody the poet Gray: 

How jocund doth George drive his team afield I 

This is all or almost all, that I remember about 
George's occupations, but he was singularly blame- 
less. 

My Father's plan now was that I should 
form a close intimacy with George, as a boy of 
my own age, of my own faith, of my own future. 
My step-mother, still in bondage to the social 
conventions, was- passionately troubled at this, 
and urged the barrier of class-differences. My 
Father replied that such an intimacy would keep 
me ''lowly," and that from so good a boy as 
George I could learn nothing undesirable. ''He 
273 



FATHER AND SON 

will encourage him not to wipe his boots when he 
comes into the house," said my step-mother, and 
my Father sighed to think how narrow is the 
horizon of Woman's view of heavenly things. 

In this caprice, if I may call it so, I think that 
my Father had before him the fine republican 
example of ''Sandford and Merton," a part of 
which book he admired extremely. Accordingly 
George and I were sent out to take walks together, 
and as we started, my Father, with an air of 
great benevolence, would suggest some passage of 
Scripture, ''some aspect of God's bountiful scheme 
in creation, on which you may profitably meditate 
together." George and I never pursued the dis- 
cussion of the text with which my Father started 
us for more than a minute or two; then we 
fell into silence, or investigated current scenes 
and rustic topics. 

As is natural among the children of the poor, 
George was precocious where I was infantile, and 
undeveloped where I was elaborate. Om* minds 
could hardly find a point at which to touch. He 
gave me, however, under cross-examination, inter- 
esting hints about rural matters, and I liked him, 
although I felt his company to be insipid. Some- 
times he carried my books by my side to the larger 
and more distant school which I now attended, 
but I was always in a fever of dread lest my 
274 



FATHER AND SON 

school-fellows should see him, and should accuse 
me of having to be ^'brought" to school. To 
explain to them that the companionship of this 
wholesome and rather blunt young peasant was 
part of my spiritual discipline would have been 
all beyond my powers. 

It was soon after this that my step-mother 
made her one vain effort to break through the 
stillness of our lives. My Father's energy seemed 
to decline, to become more fitful, to take unseason- 
able directions. My mother instinctively felt that 
his peculiarities were growing upon him; he would 
scarcely stir from his microscope, except to go 
to the chapel, and he was visible to fewer and 
fewer visitors. She had taken a pleasure in his 
literary eminence, and she was aware that this, 
too, would slip from him; that, so persistently 
kept out of sight, he must soon be out of mind. 
I know not how she gathered courage for her 
tremendous effort, but she took me, I recollect, 
into her counsels. We were to unite to oblige 
my Father to start to his feet and face the world. 
Alas! we might as well have attempted to rouse 
the summit of Yes Tor into volcanic action. To 
my mother's arguments, my Father — with that 
baffling smile of his — replied: ''I esteem the 
reproach of Christ greater riches than the treas- 
ures of Egypt!" and that this answer was indirect 
275 



FATHER AND SON 

made it none the less conclusive. My mother 
wished him to give lectm-es, to go to London, to 
read papers before the Royal Society, to enter 
into controversy with foreign savants, to conduct 
classes of out-door zoology at fashionable watering- 
places. I held my breath with admiration as 
she poured forth her scheme, so daring, so brilliant, 
so sure to cover our great man with glory. He 
listened to her with an ambiguous smile, and 
shook his head at us, and resumed the reading 
of his Bible. 

At the date at which I write these pages, the 
arts of illustration are so universally diffused that 
it is difficult to realise the darkness in which a 
remote English village was plunged half a century 
ago. No opportunity was offered to us dwellers 
in remote places of realising the outward appear- 
ances of unfamiliar persons, scenes or things. 
Although ours was perhaps the most cultivated 
household in the parish, I had never seen so much 
as a representation of a work of sculpture till 
I was thirteen. My mother then received from 
her earher home certain volumes, among which 
was a gaudy gift-book of some kind, containing 
a few steel engravings of statues. 

These attracted me violently, and here for the 
first time I gazed on Apollo with his proud gesture, 
Venus in her undulations, the kirtled shape of Di- 
276 



FATHER AND SON 

ana, and Jupiter voluminously bearded. Very lit- 
tle information, and that to me not intelligible, was 
given in the text, but these were said to be figures 
of the old Greek gods. I asked my Father to tell 
me about these ''old Greek gods." His answer was 
direct and disconcerting. He said — how I recol- 
lect the place and time, early in the morning, as 
I stood beside the window in our garish breakfast- 
room — he said that the so-called gods of the 
Greeks were the shadows cast by the vices of the 
heathen, and reflected their infamous hves; ''it 
was for such things as these that God poured 
down brimstone and fire on the Cities of the 
Plain, and there is nothing in the legends of these 
gods, or rather devils, that it is not better for a 
Christian not to know." His face blazed white 
with Puritan fury as he said this — I see him now 
in my mind's eye, in his violent emotion. You 
might have thought that he had himself escaped 
with horror from some Hellenic hippodrome. 

My Father's prestige was by this time consid- 
erably lessened in my mind, and though I loved 
and admired him, I had now long ceased to hold 
him infallible. I did not accept his condemna- 
tion of the Greeks, although I bowed to it. In 
private I returned to examine my steel engravings 
of the statues, and I reflected that they were too 
beautiful to be so wicked as my Father thought 
277 



FATHER AND SON 

they were. The dangerous and pagan notion that 
beauty palliates evil budded in my mind, without 
any external suggestion, and by this reflection 
alone I was still further sundered from the faith 
in which I had been trained. I gathered very 
diligently all I could pick up about the Greek 
gods and their statues; it was not much, it was 
indeed ludicrously little and false, but it was a 
germ. And at this aesthetic juncture I was drawn 
into what was really rather an extraordinary 
circle of incidents. 

Among the ''Saints" in our village there Hved 
a shoemaker and his wife, who had one daughter, 
Susan Flood. She was a flighty, excited young 
creature, and lately, during the passage of some 
itinerary revivalists, she had been ''converted" in 
the noisiest way, with sobs, gasps and gurgUngs. 
When this crisis passed, she came with her parents 
to our meetings, and was received quietly enough 
to the breaking of bread. But about the time 
I speak of, Susan Flood went up to London to 
pay a visit to an unconverted uncle and aunt. 
It was first whispered amongst us, and then 
openly stated, that these relations had taken her 
to the Crystal Palace, where, in passing through 
the Sculpture Gallery, Susan's sense of decency 
had been so grievously affronted, that she had 
smashed the naked figm-es with the handle of her 
278 



FATHER AND SON 

parasol, before her horrified companions could 
stop her. She had, in fact, run amok among the 
statuary, and had, to the intense chagrin of her 
uncle and aimt, very worthy persons, been ar- 
rested and brought before a magistrate, who dis- 
missed her with a warning to her relations that 
she had better be sent home to Devonshire and 
''looked after." Susan Flood's return to us, how- 
ever, was a triumph; she had no sense of having 
acted injudiciously or unbecomingly; she was 
ready to recount to every one, in vague and veiled 
language, how she had been able to testify for the 
Lord "in the very temple of Belial," for so she 
poetically described the Crystal Palace. She was, 
of course, in a state of unbridled hysteria, but 
such physical explanations were not encouraged 
amongst us, and the case of Susan Flood awakened 
a great deal of sympathy. 

There was held a meeting of the elders in our 
drawing-room to discuss it, and I contrived to 
be present, though out of observation. My 
Father, while he recognised the purity of Susan 
Flood's zeal, questioned its wisdom. He noted 
that the statuary was not her property, but that 
of the Crystal Palace. Of the other communi- 
cants, none, I think, had the very slightest notion 
what the objects were that Susan had smashed, 
or tried to smash, and frankly maintained that 
279 



FATHER AND SON 

they thought her conduct magnificent. As for 
me, I had gathered by persistent inquiry enough 
information to know that what her sacrilegious 
parasol had attacked were bodies of my mysterious 
friends, the Greek gods, and if all the rest of the 
village applauded iconoclastic Susan, I at least 
would be ardent on the other side. 

But I was conscious that there was nobody in 
the world to whom I could go for sympathy. If I 
had ever read ''Hellas" I should have murmured 

Apollo, Pan and Love, 
And even Olympian Jove, 
Grew weak, when killing Susan glared on them. 

On the day in question, I was unable to endure 
the drawing-room meeting to its close, but, clutch- 
ing my volume of the funereal poets, I made a 
dash for the garden. In the midst of a mass of 
laurels, a clearing had been made, where ferns were 
grown and a garden-seat was placed. There was 
no regular path to this asylum; one dived under 
the snake-like boughs of the laurel and came up 
again in absolute seclusion. 

Into this haunt I now fled to meditate about 
the savage godliness of that vandal, Susan Flood. 
So extremely ignorant was I that I supposed her 
to have destroyed the originals of the statues, 
marble and unique. I knew nothing about plaster 
280 



FATHER AND SON 

casts, and I thought the damage (it is possible that 
there had really been no damage whatever) was of 
an irreparable character. I sank into the seat, with 
the great wall of lam-els whispering aromid me, 
and bm-st into tears. There was something, sm-ely, 
quaint and pathetic, in the figure of a little Plym- 
outh Brother sitting in that advanced year of 
grace, weeping bitterly for indignities done to 
Hermes and to Aphrodite. Then I opened my 
book for consolation, and read a great block of 
pompous verse out of ''The Deity," in the midst 
of which exercise, jdelding to the softness of the 
hot and aromatic air, I fell fast asleep. 
/ Among those who applauded the zeal of Susan 
Flood's parasol, the Pagets were prominent. 
These were a retired Baptist minister and his 
wife, from Exmouth, who had lately settled 
amongst us, and joined in the breaking of bread. 
Mr^Paget was a fat old man, whose round pale 
face was clean-shaven, and who carried a full 
crop of loose white hair above it; his large lips 
were always moving, whether he spoke or not. 
He resembled, as I now perceive, the portraits of 
S. T. Coleridge in age, but with all the intellect 
left out of them. He lived in a sort of trance of 
solemn religious despondency. He had thrown 
up his cure of souls, because he became convinced 
that he had committed the Sin against the Holy 
281 



FATHER AND SON 

Ghost. His wife was younger than he, very 
small, very Hght, very active, with black eyes Uke 
pin-pricks at the base of an extremely high and 
narrow forehead, bordered with glossy ringlets. 
He was very cross to her, and it was murmured 
that ''dear Mrs. Paget had often had to pass 
through the waters of affliction." They were very 
poor, but rigidly genteel, and she was careful, so 
far as she could, to conceal from the world the 
caprices of her poor lunatic husband. 

In our circle, it was never for a moment ad- 
mitted that Mr. Paget was a lunatic. It was 
said that he had gravely sinned, and was under 
the Lord's displeasure; prayers were abundantly 
offered up that he might be led back into the 
pathway of light, and that the Smiling Face 
might be drawn forth for him from behind the 
Frowning Providence. When the man had an 
epileptic seizure in the High Street, he was not 
taken to a hospital, but we repeated to one 
another, with shaken heads, that Satan, that 
crooked Serpent, had been unloosed for a season. 
Mr. Paget was fond of talking in private and in 
pubhc, of his dreadful spiritual condition, and he 
would drop his voice while he spoke of having 
committed the Unpardonable Sin, with a sort of 
shuddering exultation, such as people sometimes 
feel in the possession of a very unusual disease. 
282 



FATHER AND SON 

It might be thought that the position held in 
any community by persons so afflicted and ec- 
centric as the Pagets would be very precarious. 
But it was not so with us; on the contrary, they 
took a prominent place at once. Mr. Paget, 
in spite of his spiritual bankruptcy, was only too 
anxious to help my Father in his ministrations, 
and used to beg to be allowed to pray and exhort. 
In the latter case he took the tone of a wounded 
veteran, who, though fallen on the bloody field 
himself, could still encourage younger warriors to 
march forward to victory. Everybody longed to 
know what the exact nature had been of that sin 
against the Holy Ghost which had deprived Mr. 
Paget of every glimmer of hope for time or for 
eternity. It was whispered that even my Father 
himself was not precisely acquainted with the 
character of it. 

This mysterious disability clothed Mr. Paget 
for us with a kind of romance. We watched him 
as the women watched Dante in Verona, whis- 
pering: 

Behold him, how Hell's reek 
Has crisped his hair and singed his cheek! 

His person lacked, it is true, something of the 
dignity of Dante's, for it was his caprice to walk 
up and down the High Street at noonday with 

283 



FATHER AND SON 

one of those cascades of coloured paper which 
were known as ''ornaments for your fireplace" 
slung over the back and another over the front 
of his body. These he manufactured for sale, and 
he adopted the quaint practice of wearing the 
exuberant objects as a means for their advertise- 
ment. 

Mrs. Paget had been accustomed to rule in 
the little ministry from which Mr. Paget 's 
celebrated Sin had banished them, and she was 
inclined to grasp the sceptre now. She was the 
only person I ever met with who was not afraid 
of the displeasure of my Father. She would fix 
her viper-coloured eyes on his, and say with a 
kind of gimlet firmness, ''I hardly think that is 
the true interpretation, Brother G.", or, "But let 
us turn to Colossians, and see what the Holy 
Ghost says there upon this matter." She fasci- 
nated my Father, who was not accustomed to 
this kind of interruption, and as she was not to be 
softened by any flattery (such as: — ''Marvellous 
indeed, Sister, is your acquaintance with the 
means of grace!") she became almost a terror to 
him. 

She abused her powers by taking great 

liberties, which culminated in her drawing his 

attention to the fact that my poor step-mother 

displayed "an overweening love of dress." The 

284 



FATHER AND SON 

accusation was perfectly false; my step-mother 
was, if rather richly, always plainly dressed, in 
the sober Quaker mode; almost her only orna- 
ment was a large carnelian brooch, set in flowered 
flat gold. To this the envenomed Paget drew 
my Father's attention as 'likely to lead the 'little 
ones of the flock' into temptation." My poor 
Father felt it his duty, thus directly admonished, 
to speak to my mother. ''Do you not think, my 
Love, that you should, as one who sets an ex- 
ample to others, discard the wearing of that 
gaudy brooch?" "One must fasten one's coflar 
with something, I suppose?" "Well, but how 
does Sister Paget fasten her collar?" "Sister 
Paget," replied my mother, stung at last into re- 
joinder, "fastens her collar with a pin, — and that 
is a thing which I would rather die than do!" 

Nor did I escape the attentions of this zealous 
reformer. Mrs. Paget was good enough to take 
a great interest in me, and she was not satisfied 
with the way in which I was being brought up. 
Her presence seemed to pervade the village, and 
I could neither come in nor go out without seeing 
her hard bonnet and her pursed-up Hps. She 
would hasten to report to my Father that she 
saw me laughing and talking "with a lot of un- 
converted boys," these being the companions with 
whom I had full permission to bathe and boat. 
285 



FATHER AND SON 

She urged my Father to complete my holy voca- 
tion by some definite step, by which he would 
dedicate me completely to the Lord's service. 
Further schooling she thought needless, and 
merely likely to foster intellectual pride. Mr. 
Paget, she remarked, had troubled very little 
in his youth about worldly knowledge, and yet 
how blessed he had been in the conversion of 
souls until he had incurred the displeasure of the 
Holy Ghost! 

I do not know exactly what she wanted my 
Father to do with me; perhaps she did not 
know herself; she was meddlesome, ignorant and 
fanatical, and she hked to fancy that she was 
exercising influence. But the wonderful, the in- 
explicable thing is that my Father, — who, with 
all his limitations, was so distinguished and high- 
minded, — should listen to her for a moment, 
and still more wonderful is it that he really al- 
lowed her, grim vixen that she was, to disturb 
his plans and retard his purposes. I think the 
explanation lay in the perfectly logical position 
she took up. My Father found himself brought 
face to face at last, not with a disciple, but with 
a trained expert in his own peculiar scheme of 
religion. At every point she was armed with 
arguments the source of which he knew and the 
validity of which he recognised. He trembled 
286 



FATHER AND SON 

before Mrs. Paget as a man in a dream may 
tremble before a parody of his own central self, 
and he could not blame her without laying him- 
self open somewhere to censure. 

But my step-mother's instincts were more prim- 
itive and her actions less wire-drawn than my 
Father's. She disliked Mrs. Paget as much as 
one earnest believer can bring herself to dislike 
a sister in the Lord. My step-mother quietly 
devoted herself to what she thought the best way 
of bringing me up, and she did not propose now 
to be thwarted by the wife of a lunatic Baptist. 
At this time I was a mixture of childishness and 
priggishness, of curious knowledge and dense 
ignorance. Certain portions of my intellect were 
growing with imwholesome activity, while others 
were stunted, or had never stirred at all. I was 
like a plant on which a pot has been placed, with 
the effect that the centre is crushed and arrested, 
while shoots are straggling up to the light on all 
sides. My Father himself was aware of this, and 
in a spasmodic way he wished to regulate my 
thoughts. But all he did was to try to straighten 
the shoots, without removing the pot which kept 
them resolutely down. 

It was my mother who decided that I was now 
old enough to go to boarding-school, and my 
Father, having discovered that an elderly couple 
287 



FATHER AND SON 

of Plymouth Brethren kept an '^ academy for 
young gentlemen" in a neighbouring sea-port 
town, — in the prospectus of which the knowledge 
and love of the Lord were mentioned as occupying 
the attention of the head-master and his assistants 
far more closely than any mere considerations of 
worldly tuition, — was persuaded to entrust me to 
its care. He stipulated, however, that I should 
always come home from Saturday night to Mon- 
day morning, not, as he said, that I might receive 
any carnal indulgence, but that there might be 
no cessation of my communion as a behever with 
the Saints in our village on Sundays. To this 
school, therefore, I presently departed, gawky 
and homesick, and the rift between my soul and 
that of my Father widened a little more. 



CHAPTER XII 

Little boys from quiet, pious households com- 
monly found, in those days, a chasm yawning at 
the feet of their inexperience when they arrived 
at boarding-school. But the fact that I still slept 
at home on Saturday and Simday nights pre- 
served me, I fancy, from many surprises. There 
was a crisis, but it was broad and slow for me. 
On the other hand, for my Father I am inchned 
to think that it was definite and sharp. The per- 
mission to me to desert the parental hearth, even 
for five days in certain weeks, was tantamount, 
in his mind, to admitting that the great scheme, 
so long caressed, so passionately fostered, must 
in its primitive bigness be now dropped. 

The Great Scheme (I cannot resist giving it the 
mortuary honour of capital letters) had been, as 
my readers know, that I should be exclusively and 
consecutively dedicated, through the whole of my 
life, to the manifest and uninterrupted and uncom- 
promised ''service of the Lord." That had been 



FATHER AND SON 

the aspiration of my Mother, and at her death 
she had bequeathed that desire to my Father, 
hke a dream of the Promised Land. In their 
ecstacy, my parents had taken me, as Elkanah 
and Hannah had long ago taken Samuel, from 
their mountain-home of Ramathaim-Zophim down 
to sacrifice to the Lord of Hosts in Shiloh. They 
had girt me about with a linen ephod, and had 
hoped to leave me there; ''as long as he liveth," 
they had said, "he shall be lent unto the Lord." 
Doubtless in the course of these fourteen years 
it had occasionally flashed upon my Father, as 
he overheard some speech of mine, or detected 
some idiosyncrasy, that I was not of those whose 
temperament points them out as ultimately fitted 
for an austere fife of religion. What he hoped, 
however, was that when the little roughnesses of 
childhood were rubbed away, there would pass 
a deep mellowness over my soul. He had a 
touching way of condoning my faults of conduct, 
directly after reproving them, and he would 
softly deprecate my frailty, saying, in a tone of 
harrowing tenderness, ''Are you not the child of 
many prayers?" He continued to think that 
prayer, such passionate importunate prayer as 
his, must prevail. Faith could move mountains; 
should it not be able to mould the little ductile 
heart of a child, since he was sure that his own 
290 



FATHER AND SON 

faith was unfaltering? He had yearned and 
-waited for a son who should be totally without 
human audacities, who should be humble, pure, 
not troubled by worldly agitations, a son whose 
life should be cleansed and straightened from 
above, in custodiendo sermones Dei, in whom 
everything should be sacrificed except the one 
thing needful to salvation. 

How such a marvel of lowly piety was to earn 
a living had never, I think, occurred to him. 
My Father was singularly indifferent about money. 
Perhaps his notion was that, totally devoid of 
ambitions as I was to be, I should quietly become 
adult, and continue his ministrations among the 
poor of the Christian flock. He had some dim 
dream, I think, of there being just enough for us 
all without my having to take up any business or 
trade. I believe it was immediately after my 
first term at boarding-school, that I was a silent 
but indignant witness of a conversation between 
my Father and Mr. Thomas Brightwen, my step- 
mother's brother, who was a banker in one of the 
Eastern Counties. 

This question of "what is he to be," in a 
worldly sense, was being discussed, and I am sure 
that it was for the first time, at all events in my 
presence. Mr. Brightwen, I fancy, had been 
worked upon by my step-mother, whose affection 
291 



FATHER AND SON 

for me was always on the increase, to suggest, 
or faintly to stir the air in the neighbourhood of 
suggesting, a query about my future. He was 
childless and so was she, and I think a kind im- 
pulse led them to ''feel the way," as it is called. 
I believe he said that the banking business, wisely 
and honourably conducted, sometimes led, as we 
know that it is apt to lead, to affluence. To my 
horror, my Father, with rising emphasis, replied 
that "if there were offered to his beloved child 
what is called 'an opening' that would lead to an 
income of £10,000 a year, and that would divert 
his thoughts and interest from the Lord's work, 
he would reject it on his child's behalf." Mr. 
Brightwen, a precise and polished gentleman, who 
evidently never made an exaggerated statement 
in his Ufe, was, I think, faintly scandalised; he 
soon left us, and I do not recollect his paying 
us a second visit. 

For my silent part, I felt very much like Gehazi, 
and I would fain have followed after the banker 
if I had dared to do so, into the night. I 
would have excused to him the ardom- of my 
Ehsha, and I would have reminded him of the 
sons of the prophets — "Give me, I pray thee," 
I would have said, "a talent of silver and two 
changes of garments." It seemed to me very 
hard that my Father should dispose of my possi- 
292 



FATHER AND SON 

bilities of wealth in so summary a fashion, but the 
fact that I did resent it, and regretted what I 
supposed to be my "chance," shows how far 
apart we had already swung. My Father, I am 
convinced, thought that he gave words to my 
inward instincts when he repudiated the very 
mild and inconclusive benevolence of his brother- 
in-law. But he certainly did not do so. I was 
conscious of a sharp and instinctive disappoint- 
ment at having had, as I fancied, wealth so near 
my grasp, and at seeing it all cast violently into 
the sea of my Father's scruples. 

Not one of my village friends attended the 
boarding-school to which I was now attached, 
and I arrived there without an acquaintance. I 
should soon, however, have found a corner of my 
own if my Father had not unluckily stipulated 
that I was not to sleep in the dormitory with 
boys of my own age, but in the room occupied 
by the two elder sons of a prominent Plymouth 
Brother whom he knew. From a social point of 
view, this was an unfortunate arrangement, since 
these youths were some years older and many 
years riper than I; the eldest, in fact, was soon 
to leave; they had enjoyed their independence, 
and they now greatly resented being saddled with 
the presence of an unknown urchin. The suppo- 
sition had been that they would protect and 
293 



FATHER AND SON 

foster my religious practices; would encourage 
me, indeed, as my Father put it, to approach the 
Throne of Grace with them at morning and even- 
ing prayer. They made no pretence, however, to 
be considered godly; they looked upon me as an 
intruder; and after a while the younger, and 
ruder, of them openly let me know that they be- 
lieved I had been put into their room to ''spy 
upon" them: it had been a plot, they knew, be- 
tween their father and mine : and he darkly warned 
me that I should suffer if ''anything got out." I 
had, however, no wish to trouble them, nor any 
faint interest in their affairs. I soon discovered 
that they were absorbed in a silly kind of amorous 
correspondence with the girls of a neighbouring 
academy, but ''what were all such toys to me?" 
These young fellows, who ought long before to 
have left the school, did nothing overtly unkind 
to me, but they condeimied me to silence. They 
ceased to address me except with an occasional 
command. By reason of my youth, I was in 
bed and asleep before my companions arrived up- 
stairs, and in the morning I was always routed 
up and packed about my business while they 
still were drowsing. But the fact that I had been 
cut off from my coevals by night, cut me off from 
them also by day — so that I was nothing to them, 
neither a boarder nor day scholar, neither flesh, 
294 



FATHER AND SON 

fish nor fowl. The lonehness of my life was ex- 
treme, and that I always went home on Satm-day 
afternoon and retm-ned on Monday morning still 
further checked my companionships at school. 
For a long time, round the outskirts of that busy 
throng of opening lives, I '^wandered lonely as 
a cloud," and sometimes I was more unhappy 
than I had ever been before. No one, however, 
bullied me, and though I was dimly and inde- 
finably witness to acts of uncleanness and cruelty, 
I was the victim of no such acts and the recipient 
of no dangerous confidences. I suppose that my 
queer reputation for sanctity, half dreadful, half 
ridiculous, surrounded me with a non-conducting 
atmosphere. 

We are the victims of hallowed proverbs, and 
one of the most classic of these tells us that 'Hhe 
child is father of the man." But in my case I 
cannot think that this was true. In mature years 
I have always been gregarious, a lover of my 
kind, dependent upon the company of friends for 
the very pulse of moral life. To be marooned, 
to be shut up in a solitary cell, to inhabit a light- 
house, or to camp alone in a forest, these have 
always seemed to me afflictions too heavy to be 
borne, even in imagination. A state in which con- 
versation exists not, is for me an air too empty 
of oxygen for my lungs to breathe it. 
295 



FATHER AND SON 

Yet when I look back upon my days at boarding- 
school, I see myself imattracted by any of the hu- 
man beings around me. My grown-up years are 
made luminous to me in memory by the ardent 
faces of my friends, but I can scarce recall so much 
as the names of more than two or three of my 
school-fellows. There is not one of them whose 
mind or whose character made any lasting impres- 
sion upon me. In later life, I have been impatient 
of solitude, and afraid of it ; at school, I asked for 
no more than to slip out of the hurly-burly and be 
alone with my reflections and my fancies. That 
magnetism of humanity which has been the agony 
of mature years, of this I had not a trace when I 
was a boy. Of those fragile loves to which most 
men look back with tenderness and passion, emo- 
tions to be explained only as Montaigne explained 
them, "parceque c^etait lui, parceque c'etait moi/' 
I knew nothing. I, to whom friendship has since 
been like sunlight and hke sleep, left school un- 
brightened and unrefreshed by commerce with a 
single friend. 

If I had been clever, I should doubtless have 
attracted the jealousy of my fellows, but I was 
spared this by the mediocrity of my success in 
the classes. One little fact I may mention, be- 
cause it exemplifies the advance in observation 
which has been made in forty years. I was ex- 
296 



FATHER AND SON 

tremely nearsighted and in consequence was placed 
at a gross disadvantage, by being unable to see 
the slate or the black-board on which our tasks 
were explained. It seems almost incredible, when 
one reflects upon it, but during the whole of my 
school life, this fact was never commented upon or 
taken into account by a single person, until the 
Polish lady who taught us the elements of German 
and French drew some one's attention to it in my 
sixteenth year. I was not quick, but I passed 
for being denser than I was because of the myopic 
haze that enveloped me. But this is not an auto- 
biography, and with the cold and shrouded details 
of my uninteresting school life I will not fatigue 
the reader. 

I was not content, however, to be the cipher that 
I found myself, and when I had been at school for 
about a year, I '^ broke out," greatly, I think, to 
my own surprise, in a popular act. We had a 
young usher whom we disliked. I suppose, poor 
half-starved phthisic lad, that he was the most 
miserable of us all. He was, I think, unfitted for 
the task which had been forced upon him; he was 
fretful, unsympathetic, agitated. The school- 
house, an old rambling place, possessed a long 
cellar-hke room that opened from our general 
corridor and was lighted by deep windows, care- 
fully barred, which looked into an inner garden, 
297 



FATHER AND SON 

This vault was devoted to us and to our play- 
boxes: by a tacit law, no master entered it. One 
evening, just as dusk, a great number of us were 
here when the bell for night-school rang, and 
many of us dawdled at the summons. Mr. B., 
tactless in his anger, bustled in among us, scolding 
in a shrill voice, and proceeded to drive us forth. 
I was the latest to emerge, and as he turned away 
to see if any other truant might not be hiding, 
I determined upon action. With a quick move- 
ment, I drew the door behind me and bolted it, 
just in time to hear the imprisoned usher scream 
with vexation. We boys all trooped upstairs, and 
it is characteristic of my isolation that I had not 
one "chum" to whom I could confide my feat. 

That Mr. B. had been shut in became, how- 
ever, almost instantly known, and the night-class, 
usually so unruly, was awed by the event into 
exemplary decorum. There, with no master near 
us, in a silence rarely broken by a giggle or a cat- 
call, we sat diligently working, or pretending to 
work. Through my brain, as I hung over my 
book, a thousand new thoughts began to surge. 
I was the liberator, the tyrannicide; I had freed 
all my fellows from the odious oppressor. Surely, 
when they learned that it was I, they would 
cluster round me ; surely, now, I should be some- 
body in the school-hfe, no longer a mere trotting 
298 



FATHER AND SON 

shadow or invisible presence. The interval seemed 
long; at length Mr. B. was released by a servant, 
and he came up into the school-room to find us in 
that ominous condition of suspense. 

At first he said nothing. He sank upon a chair 
in a half-fainting attitude, while he pressed his 
hand to his side ; his distress and silence redoubled 
the boys' surprise, and filled me with something 
like remorse. For the first time, I reflected that 
he was human, that perhaps he suffered. He rose 
presently and took a slate, upon which he wrote 
two questions: ''Did you do it?" ''Do you know 
who did?" and these he propounded to each boy 
in rotation. The prompt, redoubled "No" in 
every case seemed to pile up his despair. 

One of the last to whom he held, in silence, 
the trembhng slate was the perpetrator. As I 
saw the moment approach, an imspeakable tim- 
idity swept over me. I reflected that no one had 
seen me, that no one could accuse me. Nothing 
could be easier or safer than to deny, nothing 
more perplexing to the enemy, nothing less peril- 
ous for the culprit. A flood of plausible reasons 
invaded my brain; I seemed to see this to be a 
case in which to tell the truth would be not 
merely foolish, it would be wrong. Yet when the 
usher stood before me, holding the slate out in 
his white and shaking hand, I seized the pencil, 
299 



FATHER AND SON 

and, ignoring the first question, I wrote ''Yes" 
firmly against the second. I suppose that the 
ambiguity of this action puzzled Mr. B. He 
pressed me to answer: "Did you do it?" but to 
that I was obstinately dumb; and away I was 
hurried to an empty bed-room, where for the whole 
of that night and the next day I was held a pris- 
oner, visited at intervals by the head-master and 
other inquisitorial persons, until I was gradually 
persuaded to make a full confession and apology. 
This absurd little incident had one effect, it 
revealed me to my school-fellows as an existence. 
From that time forth I lay no longer under the 
stigma of invisibility; I had produced my material 
shape and had thrown my shadow for a moment 
into a legend. But, in other respects, things went 
on much as before: curiously uninfluenced by 
my surroundings, I in my turn failed to exercise 
influence, and my practical isolation was no less 
than it had been before. It was thus that it came 
about that my social memories of my boarding- 
school life are monotonous and vague. It was a 
period during which, as it appears to me now on 
looking back, the stream of my spiritual nature 
spread out into a shallow pool which was almost 
stagnant. I was labouring to gain those elements 
of conventional knowledge, which had, in many 
cases, up to that time been singularly lacking. 
300 



FATHER AND SON 

But my brain was starved, and my intellectual 
perceptions were veiled. Elder persons who in 
later years would speak to me frankly of my 
school-days assured me that, while I had often 
struck them as a smart and quaint and even 
interesting child, all promise seemed to fade out of 
me as a school-boy, and that those who were most 
inclined to be indulgent gave up the hope that I 
should prove a man in a way remarkable. This was 
particularly the case with the most indulgent of 
my protectors, my refined and gentle step-mother. 
As this record can, however, have no value that 
is not based on its rigorous adhesion to the truth, 
I am bound to say that the dreariness and sterility 
of my school-life were more apparent than real. 
I was pursuing certain lines of moral and mental 
development all the time, and if my school-mas- 
ters and my school-fellows combined in thinking 
me so dull, I will display a tardy touch of '^proper 
spirit" and ask whether it may not partly have 
been because they were themselves so common- 
place. I think that if some drops of sympathy, 
that magic dew of Paradise, had fallen upon my 
desert, it might have blossomed like the rose, or 
at all events like that chimerical flower, the Rose 
of Jericho. As it was, the conventionality around 
me, the intellectual drought, gave me no oppor- 
tunity of outward growth. They did not destroy, 
301 



FATHER AND SON 

but they cooped up, and rendered slow and in- 
efficient, that internal life which continued, as I 
have said, to hve on unseen. This took the form 
of dreams and speculations, in the course of which 
I went through many tortuous processes of the 
mind, the actual aims of which were futile, al- 
though the movements themselves were useful. 
If I may more minutely define my meaning, I 
would say that in my school-days, without pos- 
sessing thoughts, I yet prepared my mind for 
thinking, and learned how to think. 

The great subject of my curiosity at this time 
was words, as instruments of expression. I was 
incessant in adding to my vocabulary, and in 
finding accurate and individual terms for things. 
Here, too, the exercise preceded the employment, 
since I was busy providing myself with words 
before I had any idea to express with them. 
When I read Shakespeare and came upon the 
passage in which Prospero tells Caliban that he 
had no thoughts till his master taught him words, 
I remember starting with amazement at the poet's 
intuition, for such a Caliban had I been : 

I pitied thee, 
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour 
One thing or other, when thou didst not, savage, 
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble, Hke 
A thing most brutish; I endow'd thy purposes 
With words that made them known. 
302 



FATHER AND SON 

For my Prosperos I sought vaguely in such books 
as I had access to, and I was conscious that as 
the inevitable word seized hold of me, with it out 
of the darkness into strong hght came the image 
and the idea. 

My Father possessed a copy of Bailey's ''Ety- 
mological Dictionary," a book published early in 
the eighteenth century. Over this I would pore 
for hours, playing with the words in a fashion 
which I can no longer reconstruct, and delighting 
in the savour of the rich, old-fashioned country 
phrases. My Father finding me thus employed, 
fell to wondering at the nature of my pursuit, and 
I could offer him, indeed, no very intelligible ex- 
planation of it. He urged me to give up such 
idleness, and to make practical use of language. 
For this purpose he conceived an exercise which he 
obliged me to adopt, although it was hateful to 
me. He sent me forth, it might be, up the lano 
to Warbury Hill and round home by the copses; 
or else down one chine to the sea and along the 
shingle to the next cutting in the cliff, and so 
back by way of the village ; and he desired me to 
put down, in language as full as I could, all that 
I had seen in each excursion. As I have said, 
this practice was detestable and irksome to me, 
but, as I look back, I am inclined to believe it 
to have been the most salutary, the most practical 
303 



FATHER AND SON 

piece of training which my Father ever gave me. 
It forced me to observe sharply and clearly, to 
form visual impressions, to retain them in the 
brain, and to clothe them in punctilious and 
accurate language. 

It was in my fifteenth year that I became again, 
this time intelligently, acquainted with Shake- 
speare. I got hold of a single play, The Tempest, 
in a school edition, prepared, I suppose, for one 
of the university examinations which were then 
being instituted in the provinces. This I read 
through and through, not disdaining the help of 
the notes, and revelling in the glossary. I studied 
The Tempest as I had hitherto studied no classic 
work, and it filled my whole being with music and 
romance. This book was my own hoarded pos- 
session ; the rest of Shakespeare's works were be- 
yond my hopes. But gradually I contrived to 
borrow a volume here and a volume there. I 
completed The Merchant of Venice, read Cymbe- 
line, Julius Ccesar and Mu£h Ado; most of the 
others, I think, remained closed to me for a long 
time. But these were enough to steep my horizon 
with all the colours of sunrise. It was due, no 
doubt, to my bringing up, that the plays never 
appealed to me as boimded by the exigencies of 
a stage or played by actors. The images they 
raised in my mind were of real people moving in 
304 



FATHER AND SON 

the open air, and uttering in the natural play of 
life sentiments that were clothed in the most lovely 
and yet, as it seemed to me, the most obvious 
and the most inevitable language. 

It was while I was thus under the full spell of 
the Shakespearean necromancy that a significant 
event occurred. My Father took me up to Lon- 
don for the first time since my infancy. Our visit 
was one of a few days only, and its purpose was 
that we might take part in some enormous Evan- 
gelical conference. We stayed in a dark hotel off 
the Strand, where I found the noise by day and 
night very afflicting. When we were not at the 
conference, I spent long hours, among crumbs and 
blue-bottle flies, in the coffee-room of this hotel, 
my Father being busy at the British Museum and 
the Royal Society. The conference was held in 
an immense hall, somewhere in the north of Lon- 
don. I remember my short-sighted sense of the 
terrible vastness of the crowd, with rings on rings 
of dim white faces fading in the fog. My Father, 
as a privileged visitor, was obliged with seats on 
the platform, and we were in the heart of the 
first really large assemblage of persons that I had 
ever seen. 

The interminable ritual of prayers, hymns and 
addresses left no impression on my memory, but 
my attention was suddenly stung into Hfe by a 
305 



FATHER AND SON 

remark. An elderly man, fat and greasy, with 
a voice like a bassoon, and an imperturbable as- 
surance, was denouncing the spread of infidehty, 
and the lukewarmness of professing Christians, 
who refrained from battling the wickedness at 
their doors. They were like the Laodiceans, 
whom the angel of the Apocalypse spewed out 
of his mouth. For instance, who, the orator 
asked, is now rising to check the outburst of 
idolatry in our midst? ''At this veiy moment," 
he went on, "there is proceeding, unreproved, 
a blasphemous celebration of the birth of Shake- 
speare, a lost soul now suffering for his sins in 
hell!" My sensation was that of one who has 
suddenly been struck on the head ; stars and sparks 
beat round me. If some person I loved had been 
grossly insulted in my presence, I could not have 
felt more powerless in anguish. No one in that 
vast audience raised a word of protest, and my 
spirits fell to their nadir. This, be it remarked, 
was the earhest intimation that had reached me 
of the tercentenary of the Birth at Stratford, and 
I had not the least idea what could have pro- 
voked the outburst of outraged godhness. 

But Shakespeare was certainly in the air. When 

we returned to the hotel that noon, my Father 

of his own accord reverted to the subject. I held 

my breath, prepared to endure fresh torment. 

306 



FATHER AND SON 

What he said, however, surprised and reUeved 
me. "Brother So-and-so," he remarked, ''was 
not in my judgment justified in saying what he 
did. The uncovenanted mercies of God are not 
revealed to us. Before so rashly speaking of 
Shakespeare as 'a lost soul in hell,' he should have 
remembered how httle we know of the poet's 
history. The light of salvation was widely dis- 
seminated in the land during the reign of Queen 
Ehzabeth, and we cannot know that Shakespeare 
did not accept the atonement of Christ in simple 
faith before he came to die." The concession 
will to-day seem meagre to gay and worldly 
spirits, but words cannot express how comfort- 
able it was to me. I gazed at my Father with 
loving eyes across the cheese and celery, and if 
the waiter had not been present I believe I might 
have hugged him in my arms. 

This anecdote may serve to illustrate the atti- 
tude of my conscience, at this time, with regard 
to theology. I was not consciously in any re- 
volt against the strict faith in which I had been 
brought up, but I could not fail to be aware of 
the fact that literature tempted me to stray up 
innumerable paths which meandered in directions 
at right angles to that direct strait way which 
leadeth to salvation. I fancied, if I may pursue 
the image, that I was still safe up these pleasant 
307 



FATHER AND SON 

lanes if I did not stray far enough to lose sight of 
the main road. If, for instance, it had been quite 
certain that Shakespeare had been irrecoverably 
damnable and damned, it would scarcely have 
been possible for me to have justified myself in 
going on reading Cymbeline. One who broke 
bread with the Saints every Sunday morning, 
who 'Hook a class" at Sunday school, who made, 
as my Father loved to remind me, a public weekly 
confession of his willingness to bear the Cross of 
Christ, such an one could hardly, however be- 
wildering and tortm-ing the thought, continue to 
admire a lost soul. But that happy possibility 
of an ultimate repentance, how it eased me! I 
could always console myself with the beUef that 
when Shakespeare wrote any passage of intoxi- 
cating beauty, it was just then that he was be- 
ginning to breathe the rapture that faith in 
Christ brings to the anointed soul. And it was 
with a hke casuistry that I condoned my other 
intellectual and personal pleasures. 

My Father continued to be imder the im- 
pression that my boarding-school, which he never 
again visited after originally leaving me there, 
was conducted upon the same principles as his 
own household. I was frequently tempted to 
enlighten him, but I never found the courage to 
do so. As a matter of fact the piety of the es- 
308 



FATHER AND SON 

tablishment, which collected to it the sons of a 
large number of evangelically minded parents 
throughout that part of the country, resided 
mainly in the prospectus. It proceeded no further 
than the practice of reading the Bible aloud, each 
boy in successive order one verse, in the early morn- 
ing before breakfast. There was no selection and 
no exposition; where the last boy sat, there the 
day's reading ended, even if it were in the middle 
of a sentence, and there it began next morning. 

Such reading of ''the chapter" was followed by 
a long dry prayer. I do not know that this morn- 
ing service would appear more perfunctory than 
usual to other boys, but it astounded and dis- 
gusted me, accustomed as I was to the minis- 
trations at home, where my Father read ''the 
word of God" in a loud passionate voice, with 
dramatic emphasis, pausing for commentary and 
paraphrase, and treating every phrase as if it 
were part of a personal message or of thrilling 
family history. At school, "morning prayer" 
was a dreary, unintelligible exercise, and with 
this piece of mumbo- jumbo, religion for the day 
began and ended. The discretion of httle boys 
is extraordinary. I am quite certain no one of 
us ever revealed this fact to our godly parents at 
home. 

If any one was to do this, it was of course I 
309 



FATHER AND SON 

who should first of all have "testified." But I had 
grown cautious about making confidences. One 
never knew how awkwardly they might develop 
or to what disturbing excesses of zeal they might 
precipitously lead. I was on my guard against 
my Father, who was, all the time, only too openly 
yearning that I should approach him for help, for 
comfort, for ghostly counsel. Still "delicate," 
though steadily gaining in solidity of constitution, 
I was liable to severe chills and to fugitive neu- 
ralgic pangs. My Father was, almost maddeningly, 
desirous that these afflictions should be sanctified 
to me, and it was in my bed, often when I was 
much bowed in spirit by indisposition, that he 
used to triumph over me most pitilessly. He re- 
tained the singular superstition, amazing in a 
man of scientific knowledge and long human ex- 
perience, that all pains and ailments were directly 
sent by the Lord in chastisement for some definite 
fault, and not in relation to any physical cause. 
The result was sometimes quite startling, and in 
particular I recollect that my step-mother and I 
exchanged impressions of astonishment at my 
Father's action when Mrs. Goodyer, who was 
one of the ''Saints" and the wife of a young 
journeyman cobbler, broke her leg. My Father, 
puzzled for an instant as to the meaning of 
this accident, since Mrs. Goodyer was the gen- 
310 



FATHER AND SON 

tlest and most inoffensive of our church members, 
decided that it must be because she had made 
an idol of her husband, and he reduced the poor 
thing to tears by standing at her bed-side and im- 
ploring the Holy Spirit to bring this sin home 
to her conscience. 

When, therefore, I was ill at home with one of 
my trifling disorders, the problem of my spiritual 
state always pressed violently upon my Father, 
and this caused me no little mental uneasiness. 
He would appear at my bed-side, with solemn 
sohcitude, and sinking on his knees would ear- 
nestly pray aloud that the purpose of the Lord 
in sending me this affliction might graciously be 
made plain to me, and then, rising and stand- 
ing by my pillow, he would put me through a 
searching spiritual inquiry as to the fault which 
was thus divinely indicated to me as observed 
and reprobated on high. 

It was not on points of moral behaviour 
that he thus cross-examined me; I think he dis- 
dained such ignoble game as that. But un- 
certainties of doctrine, rehnquishment of faith 
in the purity of this dogma or of that, lukewarm 
zeal in ''taking up the cross of Christ," growth 
of intellectual pride — such were the insidious of- 
fences in consequence of which, as he supposed, 
the cold in the head or the toothache had been sent 
311 



FATHER AND SON 

as heavenly messengers to recall my straggling 
conscience to its plain path of duty. 

What made me very uncomfortable on these oc- 
casions was my consciousness that confinement to 
bed was hardly an affliction at all. It kept me 
from the boredom of school, in a fire-lit bed-room 
at home, with my pretty, smiling step-mother 
lavishing luxurious attendance upon me, and it 
gave me long, unbroken days for reading. I was 
awkwardly aware that I simply had not the 
effrontery to ''approach the Throne of Grace" 
with a request to know for what sin I was con- 
demned to such a very pleasant disposition of my 
hours. 

The current of my life ran, during my school- 
days, most merrily and fully in the holidays, when 
I resumed my out-door exercises with those 
friends in the village of whom I have spoken ear- 
her. I think they were more refined and better 
bred than any of my school-fellows, at all events 
it was among these homely companions alone that 
I continued to form congenial and sympathetic 
relations. In one of these boys — one of whom I 
have heard or seen nothing now for nearly a gen- 
eration — I found tastes singularly parallel to my 
own, and we scoured the horizon in search of 
books in prose and verse, but particularly in verse. 

As I grew stronger in muscle, I was capable 
312 



FATHER AND SON 

of adding considerably to my income by an 
exercise of my legs. I was allowed money for 
the railway ticket between the town where the 
school lay and the station nearest to my home. 
But, if I chose to walk six or seven miles along the 
coast, thus more than halving the distance by 
rail from school-house to home, I might spend as 
pocket-money the railway fare I thus saved. 
Such considerable sums I fostered in order to 
buy with them editions of the poets. These 
were not in those days, as they are now, at the 
beck and call of every purse, and the attainment 
of each little masterpiece was a separate triumph. 
In particular I shall never forget the excitement 
of reaching at last the exorbitant price the 
bookseller asked for the only, although imperfect, 
edition of the poems of S. T. Coleridge. At last 
I could meet his demand, and my friend and I 
went down to consummate the solemn purchase. 
Coming away with our treasure, we read aloud 
from the orange-coloured volume in turns, as we 
strolled along, until at last we sat down on the 
bulging root of an elm-tree in a secluded lane. 
Here we stayed, in a sort of poetical Nirvana, 
reading, reading, forgetting the passage of time, 
until the hour of our neglected mid-day meal was 
a long while past, and we had to hurry home to 
bread and cheese and a scolding. 
313 



FATHER AND SON 

There was occasionally some trouble about my 
reading, but now not much nor often. I was 
rather adroit, and careful not to bring promi- 
nently into sight anything of a literary kind which 
could become a stone of stumbhng. But, when 
I was nearly sixteen, I made a purchase which 
brought me into sad trouble, and was the cause 
of a permanent wound to my self-respect. I had 
long coveted in the book-shop window a volume 
in which the poetical works of Ben Jonson and 
Christopher Marlowe were said to be combined. 
This I bought at length, and I carried it with me 
to devour as I trod the desolate road that brought 
me along the edge of the chff on Saturday after- 
noons. Ben Jonson I could make nothing of, but 
when I turned to "Hero and Leander," I was 
Hfted to a heaven of passion and music. It was 
a marvellous revelation of romantic beauty to me, 
and as I paced along that lonely and exquisite 
high-way, with its immense command of the sea, 
and its peeps every now and then, through slant- 
ing thickets, far down to the snow-white shingle, 
I hfted up my voice, singing the verses, as I 
strolled along: 

Buskins of shells, all silver'd, usfed she, 
And branch'd with blushing coral to the knee, 
Where sparrows perched, of hollow pearl and gold, 
Such as the world would wonder to behold, — 
314 



FATHER AND SON 

so it went on, and I thought I had never read 
anjrthing so lovely, — 



Amorous Leander, beautiful and young, 
Whose tragedy divine Musaeus sung, — 



it all seemed to my fancy intoxicating beyond any- 
thing I had ever even dreamed of, since I had not 
yet become acquainted with any of the modern 
romanticists. 

When I reached home, tired out with enthu- 
siasm and exercise, I must needs, so soon as I 
had eaten, search out my step-mother that she 
might be a partner in my joys. It is remarkable 
to me now, and a disconcerting proof of my still 
almost infantile innocence, that, having induced 
her to settle to her knitting embroidery, I began, 
without hesitation, to read Marlowe's voluptuous 
poem aloud to that blameless Christian gentle- 
woman. We got on very well in the opening, but 
at the episode of Cupid's pining, my step-mother's 
needles began nervously to clash, and when we 
launched on the description of Leander's person, 
she interrupted me by saying, rather sharply, 
"Give me that book, please, I should like to 
read the rest to myself." I resigned the reading 
in amazement, and was stupefied to see her take 
the volume, shut it with a snap and hide it under 
315 



FATHER AND SON 

her needlework. Nor could I extract from her 
another word on the subject. 

The matter passed from my mind, and I was 
therefore extremely alarmed when, soon after 
my going to bed that night, my Father came into 
my room with a pale face and burning eyes, the 
prey of violent perturbation. He set down the 
candle and stood by the bed, and it was some time 
before he could resolve on a form of speech. Then 
he denounced me, in unmeasured terms, for bring- 
ing into the house, for possessing at all or read- 
ing, so abominable a book. He explained that 
my step-mother had shown it to him, and that 
he had looked through it, and had burned it. 
The sentence in his tirade which principally af- 
fected me was this. He said, ''You will soon be 
leaving us, and going up to lodgings in London, 
and if your landlady should come into your room, 
and find such a book lying about, she would im- 
mediately set you down as a profligate." I did 
not imderstand this at all, and it seems to me 
now that the fact that I had so very simply and 
childishly volunteered to read the verses to my 
step-mother should have proved to my Father that 
I connected it with no ideas of an immoral natiu-e. 

I was greatly wounded and offended, but my 
indignation was smothered up in the alarm and 
excitement which followed the news that I was to 
316 



FATHER AND SON 

go up to live in lodgings, and, as it was evident, 
alone, in London. Of this no hint or whisper had 
previously reached me. On reflection, I can but 
admit that my Father, who was httle accustomed 
to seventeenth-centmy literature, must have 
come across some startling exposures in Ben Jon- 
son, and probably never reached "Hero and Le- 
ander" at all. The artistic effect of such poetry 
on an innocently pagan mind did not come within 
the circle of his experience. He judged the out- 
spoken EHzabethan poets, no doubt, very much 
in the spirit of the problematical landlady. 

Of the world outside, of the dim wild whirlpool 
of London, I was much afraid, but I was now 
ready to be willing to leave the narrow Devonshire 
circle, to see the last of the red mud, of the dreary 
village street, of the plethoric elders, to hear the 
last of the drawling voices of the ''Saints." Yet 
I had a great difficulty in persuading myself that 
I could ever be happy away from home, and again 
I compared my lot with that of one of the speckled 
soldier-crabs that roamed about in my Father's 
aquarium, dragging after them great whorl- 
shells. They, if by chance they were turned 
out of their whelk-habitations, trailed about a 
pale soft body in search of another house, visibly 
broken-hearted and the victims of every ignomin- 
ious accident. 

317 



FATHER AND SON 

My spirits were divided pathetically between 
the wish to stay on, a guarded child, and to pro- 
ceed into the world a budding man, and, in my 
utter ignorance, I sought in vain to conjure up 
what my immediate future would be. My Father 
threw no light upon the subject, for he had not 
formed any definite idea of what I could possibly 
do to earn an honest living. As a matter of fact 
I was to stay another year at school and home. 

This last year of my boyish life passed rapidly 
and pleasantly. My sluggish brain waked up 
at last and I was able to study with application. 
In the public examinations I did pretty well, 
and may even have been thought something of a 
credit to the school. Yet I formed no close 
associations, and I even contrived to avoid, as 
I had afterwards occasion to regret, such lessons 
as were distasteful to me, and therefore particu- 
larly valuable. But I read with unchecked 
voracity, and in several curious directions. 
Shakespeare now passed into my possession 
entire, in the shape of a reprint more hideous 
and more offensive to the eyesight than would 
in these days appear conceivable. I made ac- 
quaintance with Keats, who entirely captivated 
me; with Shelley, whose ''Queen Mab" at first 
repelled me from the threshold of his edifice; 
and with Wordsworth, for the exercise of whose 
318 



FATHER AND SON 

magic I was still far too young. My Father pre- 
sented me with the entire bulk of Southey's stony 
verse, which I found it impossible to penetrate, 
but my step-mother lent me "The Golden Treas- 
ury," in which almost everything seemed ex- 
quisite. 

Upon this extension of my intellectual powers, 
however, there did not follow any spirit of doubt 
or hostility to the faith. On the contrary, at 
first there came a considerable quickening of 
fervour. My prayers became less frigid and me- 
chanical; I no longer avoided as far as possible 
the contemplation of rehgious ideas; I began to 
search the Scriptures for myself with interest and 
sympathy, if scarcely with ardour. I began to 
perceive, without animosity, the strange narrow- 
ness of my Father's system, which seemed to 
take into consideration only a selected circle of 
persons, a group of disciples peculiarly illumin- 
ated, and to have no message whatever for the 
wider Christian community. 

On this subject I had some instructive conver- 
sations with my Father, whom I found not re- 
luctant to have his convictions pushed to their 
logical extremity. He did not wish to judge, he 
protested; but he could not admit that a single 
Unitarian (or ''Socinian," as he preferred to say) 
could possibly be redeemed ; and he had no hope 
319 



FATHER AND SON 

of eternal salvation for the inhabitants of Catholic 
countries. I recollect his speaking of Austria. 
He questioned whether a single Austrian subject, 
except, as he said, here and there a pious and 
extremely ignorant individual, who had not com- 
prehended the errors of the Papacy, but had 
humbly studied his Bible, could hope to find 
eternal hfe. He thought that the ordinary 
Chinaman or savage native of Fiji had a better 
chance of salvation than any cardinal in the 
Vatican. And even in the priesthood of the 
Church of England he believed that while many 
were called, few indeed would be found to have 
been chosen. 

I could not sympathise, even in my then state 
of ignorance, with so rigid a conception of the 
Divine mercy. Little inclined as I was to be 
sceptical, I still thought it impossible that a 
secret of such stupendous importance should 
have been entrusted to a Uttle group of Plymouth 
Brethren, and have been hidden from millions of 
disinterested and pious theologians. That the 
leaders of European Christianity were sincere, 
my Father did not attempt to question. But 
they were all of them wrong, incorrect; and no 
matter how holy their lives, how self-sacrificing 
their actions, they would have to suffer for their 
inexactitude through aeons of undefined torment. 
320 



FATHER AND SON 

He would speak with a solemn complacency of 
the aged nun, who, after a long life of renuncia- 
tion and devotion, died at last, "only to discover 
her mistake." 

He who was so tender-hearted that he could 
not bear to witness the pain or distress of any 
person, however disagreeable or undeserving, was 
quite acquiescent in believing that God would 
punish human beings, in millions forever, for a 
purely intellectual error of comprehension. 

My Father's inconsistencies of perception seem 
to me to have been the result of a curious irregu- 
larity of equipment. Taking for granted, as he 
did, the absolute integrity of the Scriptures, and 
applying to them his trained scientific spirit, he 
contrived to stifle with a deplorable success alike 
the function of the imagination, the sense of 
moral justice and his own deep and instinctive 
tenderness of heart. 

There presently came over me a strong desire to 
know what doctrine indeed it was that the other 
Churches taught. I expressed a wish to be made 
aware of the practices of Rome, or at least of 
Canterbury, and I longed to attend the Anghcan 
and the Roman services. But to do so was im- 
possible. My Father did not forbid me to enter 
the fine parish church of our village, or the stately 
Puginesque cathedral which Rome had just 
321 



FATHER AND SON 

erected at its side, but I knew that I could not 
be seen at either service without his immediately 
knowing it, or without his being deeply wounded. 
Although I was sixteen years of age, and although 
I was treated with indulgence and affection, I 
was still but a bird fluttering in the net-work of 
my Father's will, and incapable of the smallest 
independent action. I resigned all thought of 
attending any other services than those at our 
''Room," but I did no longer regard this exclu- 
sion as a final one. I bowed, but it was in the 
house of Rimmon, from which I now knew that 
I must inevitably escape. All the liberation, 
however, which I desired or dreamed of was only 
just so much as would bring me into communion 
with the outer world of Christianity, without di- 
vesting me of the pure and simple principles of 
faith. 

Of so much emancipation, indeed, I now be- 
came ardently desirous, and in the contempla- 
tion of it I rose to a more considerable degree of 
religious fervour than I had ever reached before or 
was ever to experience later. Our thoughts were at 
this time abundantly exercised with the expecta- 
tation of the immediate coming of the Lord, who, 
as my Father and those who thought with him 
believed, would suddenly appear, without the 
least warning, and would catch up to be with 
322 



FATHER AND SON 

Him in everlasting glory all whom acceptance of 
the Atonement had sealed for immortality. These 
were, on the whole, not numerous, and our behef 
was that the world, after a few days' amazement 
at the total disappearance of these persons, 
would revert to its customary habits of hfe, 
merely sinking more rapidly into a moral corrup- 
tion due to the removal of these souls of salt. 
This event an examination of prophecy had led 
my Father to regard as absolutely imminent, and 
sometimes, when we parted for the night, he would 
say with a sparkhng rapture in his eyes, ''Who 
knows? We may meet next in the air, with all 
the cohorts of God's saints!" 

This conviction I shared, without a doubt ; and, 
indeed, — in perfect innocency, I hope, but perhaps 
with a touch of slyness too, — I proposed at the end 
of the summer holidays that I should stay at 
home. ''What is the use of my going to school? 
Let me be with you when we rise to meet the Lord 
in the air!" To this my Father sharply and 
firmly replied that it was our duty to carry on 
our usual avocations to the last, for we knew not 
the moment of His coming, and we should be to- 
gether in an instant on that day, how far soever 
we might be parted upon earth. I was ashamed, 
but his argument was logical, and, as it proved, 
judicious. My Father hved for nearly a quarter 
323 



FATHER AND SON 

of a century more, never losing the hope of ''not 
tasting death/' and as the last moments of mor- 
tality approached, he was bitterly disappointed at 
what he held to be a scanty reward of his long 
faith and patience. But if my own life's work 
had been, as I proposed, shelved in expectation 
of the Lord's imminent advent, I should have 
cumbered the ground until this day. 

To school, therefore, I returned with a brain 
full of strange discords, in a huddled mixture 
of ''Endymion" and the Book of Revelation, 
John Wesley's hymns and Midsummer Night's 
Dream. Few boys of my age, I suppose, carried 
about with them such a confused throng of im- 
mature impressions and contradictory hopes. 
I was at one moment devoutly pious, at the next 
haunted by visions of material beauty and longing 
for sensuous impressions. In my hot and silly 
brain, Jesus and Pan held sway together, as in a 
wayside chapel discordantly and impishly con- 
secrated to Pagan and to Christian rites. But 
for the present, as in the great chorus which so 
marvellously portrays our double nature, "the 
folding-star of Bethlehem" was still dominant. 
I became more and more pietistic. Beginning 
now to versify, I wrote a tragedy in pale imitation 
of Shakespeare, but on a Bibhcal and evangelistic 
subject, and odes that were imitations of those 
324 



FATHER AND SON 

in 'Trometheus Unbound," but dealt with the 
approaching advent of our Lord and the rapture 
of his saints. My unwholesome excitement, 
bubbling up in this violent way, reached at last 
a climax and foamed over. 

It was a summer afternoon, and, being now left 
very free in my movements, I had escaped from 
going out with the rest of my school-fellows in 
their formal walk in charge of an usher. I had 
been reading a good deal of poetry, but my heart 
had translated Apollo and Bacchus into terms 
of exalted Christian faith. I was alone, and I lay 
on a sofa, drawn across a large open window at 
the top of the school-house, in a room which was 
used as a study by the boys who were 'Agoing up for 
examination." I gazed down on a labyrinth of 
gardens sloping to the sea, which twinkled faintly 
beyond the towers of the town. Each of these 
gardens held a villa in it, but all the near land- 
scape below me was drowned in foliage. A 
wonderful warm light of approaching sunset 
modelled the shadows and set the broad summits 
of the trees in a rich glow. There was an abso- 
lute silence below and around me, a magic of sus- 
pense seemed to keep every topmost twig from 
waving. 

Over my soul there swept an immense wave 
of emotion. Now, surely, now the great final 
325 



FATHER AND SON 

change must be approaching. I gazed up into the 
faintly-coloured sky, and I broke irresistibly 
into speech. ''Come now, Lord Jesus," I cried, 
''come now and take me to be for ever with Thee 
in Thy Paradise. I am ready to come. My 
heart is purged from sin, there is nothing that 
keeps me rooted to this wicked world. Oh, come 
now, now, and take me before I have known the 
temptations of hfe, before I have to go to Lon- 
don and all the dreadful things that happen 
there!" And I raised myself on the sofa, and 
leaned upon the window-sill, and waited for the 
glorious apparition. 

This was the highest moment of my rehgious 
life, the apex of my striving after hohness. I 
waited awhile, watching; and then I had a little 
shame at the theatrical attitude I had adopted, 
although I was alone. Still I gazed and still I 
hoped. Then a httle breeze sprang up, and the 
branches danced. Sounds began to rise from 
the road, beneath me. Presently the colour deep- 
ened, the evening came on. From far below there 
rose to me the chatter of the boys returning home. 
The tea-bell rang, — last word of prose to shatter 
my mystical poetry. "The Lord has not come, 
the Lord will never come," I muttered, and in 
my heart the artificial edifice of extravagant 
faith began to totter and crumble. From that 
326 



FATHER AND SON 

moment forth my Father and I, though the fact 
was long successfully concealed from him and 
even from myself, walked in opposite hemis- 
pheres of the soul, with ''the thick o' the world 
between us." 



327 



EPILOGUE 

This narrative, however, must not be allowed to 
close with the son in the foreground of the piece. 
If it has a value, that value consists in what 
light it may contrive to throw upon the unique 
and noble figure of the father. With the ad- 
vance of years, the characteristics of this figure 
became more severely outlined, more rigorously 
confined within settled hmits. In relation to 
the son — who presently departed, at a very im- 
mature age, for the new life in London — the at- 
titude of the father continued to be one of ex- 
treme soUcitude, deepening by degrees into dis- 
appointment and disenchantment. He abated 
no jot or tittle of his demands upon human frailty. 
He kept the spiritual cord drawn tight; the Bib- 
lical bearing-rein was incessantly busy, jerking 
into position the head of the dejected neophyte. 
That young soul, removed from the father's per- 
sonal inspection, began to blossom forth crudely 
and irregularly enough into new provinces of 
328 



FATHER AND SON 

thought, through fresh layers of experience. To 
the painful mentor at home in the West, the 
centre of anxiety was still the meek and docile 
heart, dedicated to the Lord's service, which 
must, at all hazards and with all defiance of 
the rules of life, be kept unspotted from the 
world. 

The torment of a postal inquisition began di- 
rectly I was settled in my London lodgings. To 
my Father, — with his ample leisure, his palpitating 
apprehension, his ready pen, — the flow of cor- 
respondence offered no trouble at all; it was a 
grave but gratifying occupation. To me the al- 
most daily letter of exhortation, with its siring 
of questions about conduct, its series of warnings, 
grew to be a burden which could hardly be borne, 
particularly because it involved a reply as punc- 
tual and if possible as full as itself. At the age 
of seventeen, the metaphysics of the soul are 
shadowy, and it is a dreadful thing to be forced 
to define the exact outline of what is so undu- 
lating and so shapeless. To my Father there 
seemed no reason why I should hesitate to give 
answers of full metallic ring to his hard and oft- 
repeated questions; but to me this correspond- 
ence was tortiu-e. When I feebly expostulated, 
when I begged to be left a httle to myself, these 
appeals of mine automatically stimulated, and 
329 



FATHER AND SON 

indeed blew up into fierce flames, the ardour of 
my Father's alarm. 

The letter, the only too-confidently expected 
letter, would lie on the table as I descended to 
breakfast. It would conunonly be, of course, 
my only letter, unless tempered by a cosy and 
chatty note from my dear and comfortable step- 
mother, dealing with such perfectly tranquillising 
subjects as the harvest of roses in the garden or 
the state of health of various neighbours. But 
the other, the solitary letter, in its threatening 
whiteness, with its exquisitely penned address — 
there it would He awaiting me, destroying the 
taste of the bacon, reducing the flavour of the 
tea to insipidity. I might fatuously dally with 
it, I might pretend not to observe it, but there 
it lay. Before the morning's exercise began, I 
knew that it had to be read, and what was 
worse, that it had to be answered. Useless the 
effort to conceal from myself what it contained. 
Like all its precursors, like all its followers, it 
would insist, with every variety of appeal, on 
a reiterated declaration that I still fully intended, 
as in the days of my earhest childhood, 'Ho be on 
the Lord's side" in everything. 

In my replies, I would sometimes answer pre- 
cisely as I was desired to answer; sometimes I 
would evade the queries, and write about other 
330 



FATHER AND SON 

things; sometimes I would turn upon the tor- 
mentor, and urge that my tender youth might 
be let alone. It little mattered what form of 
weakness I put forth by way of baffling my 
Father's direct, firm, unflinching strength. To 
an appeal against the bondage of a correspond- 
ence of such unbroken solemnity I would receive 
— with what a paralysing promptitude! — such a 
reply as this: — 

''Let me say that the 'solemnity* you com- 
plain of has only been the expression of tender 
anxiousness of a father's heart, that his only 
child, just tmned out upon the world, and very 
far out of his sight and hearing, should be walk- 
ing in God's way. Recollect that it is not now 
as it was when you were at school, when we had 
personal communication with you at intervals 
of five days: — we now know absolutely nothing 
of you, save from your letters, and if they do not 
indicate your spiritual prosperity, the deepest 
sohcitudes of our hearts have nothing to feed 
on. But I will try henceforth to trust you, and 
lay aside my fears ; for you are worthy of my con- 
fidence; and your own God and your father's 
God will hold you with His right hand." 

Over such letters as these I am not ashamed 
331 



FATHER AND SON 

to say that I sometimes wept; the old paper I 
have just been copying shows traces of tears shed 
upon it more than forty years ago, tears com- 
mingled of despair at my own feebleness, distrac- 
tion at my want of will, pity for my Father's 
manifest and pathetic distress. He would ''try 
henceforth to trust" me, he said. Alas! the 
effort would be in vain ; after a day or two, after 
a hollow attempt -to write of other things, the im- 
portunate subject would recur; there would in- 
trude again the inevitable questions about the 
Atonement and the Means of Grace, the old anx- 
ious fears lest I was ''yielding" my intimacy to 
agreeable companions who were not "one with 
me in Christ," fresh passionate entreaties to be 
assured, in every letter, that I wa^ walking in the 
clear Ught of God's presence. 

It seems to me now profoundly strange, al- 
though I knew too Httle of the world to remark it 
at the time, that these incessant exhortations 
dealt, not with conduct, but with faith. Earlier 
in this narrative I have noted how disdainfully, 
with what an austere pride, my Father refused 
to entertain the subject of personal shortcom- 
ings in my behaviour. There were enough of 
them to blame, heaven knows, but he was too 
lofty-minded a gentleman to dwell upon them, 
and, though by nature deeply suspicious of the 
332 



FATHER AND SON 

possibility of frequent moral lapses, even in the 
very elect, he refused to stoop to anything like 
espionage. 

I owe him a deep debt of gratitude for his 
beautiful faith in me in this respect, and now 
that I was alone in London, at this tender time 
of life, ''exposed," as they say, to all sorts 
of dangers, as defenceless as a fledgling that 
has been turned out of its nest, yet my Father 
did not, in his uplifted Quixotism, allow himself 
to fancy me guilty of any moral misbehaviour, 
but concentrated his fears entirely upon my faith. 

''Let me know more of your inner light. Does 
the candle of the Lord shine on your soul?" 
This would be the ceaseless inquiry. Or, again, 
"Do you get any spiritual companionship with 
young men? You passed over last Sunday with- 
out even a word, yet this day is the most interest- 
ing to me in your whole week. Do you find the 
ministry of the Word pleasant, and, above all, 
profitable? Does it bring your soul into exer- 
cise before God? The Coming of Christ draweth 
nigh. Watch, therefore, and pray always, that 
you may be counted worthy to stand before the 
Son of Man." 

If I quote such passages as this from my 
Father's letters to me, it is not that I seek 
entertainment in a contrast between his earnest- 
333 



FATHER AND SON 

ness and the casuistical inattention and pro- 
voked distractedness of a young man to whom 
the real world now offered its irritating and 
stimulating scenes of animal and intellectual Hfe, 
but to call out sympathy, and perhaps wonder, 
at the spectacle of so blind a Roman firmness 
as my Father's spiritual attitude displayed. 

His aspirations were individual and meta- 
physical. At the present hour, so complete is 
the revolution which has overturned the puritan- 
ism of which he was perhaps the latest surviving 
type, that all classes of religious persons com- 
bine in placing philanthropic activity, the ob- 
jective attitude, in the foreground. It is extra- 
ordinary how far-reaching the change has been, 
so that nowadays a religion which does not com- 
bine with its subjective faith a strenuous labour 
for the good of others is hardly held to possess 
any religious principle worth holding. 

This propaganda of beneficence, this constant 
attention to the moral and physical improvement 
of persons who have been neglected, is quite recent 
as a leading feature of religion, though indeed it 
seems to have formed some part of the Saviour's 
original design. It was unknown to the great 
divines of the seventeenth century, whether 
Catholic or Protestant, and it offered but a shad- 
owy attraction to my Father, who was the last 
334 



FATHER AND SON 

of their disciples. When Bossuet desired his 
hearers to Ksten to the ^^cri de misere a Ventour de 
nous, qui devrait nous fondre le coeur/' he started 
a new thing in the world of theology. We may 
search the famous "Rule and Exercises of Holy 
Living" from cover to cover, and not learn that 
Jeremy Taylor would have thought that any 
activity of the district-visitor or the Salvation 
lassie came within the category of saintliness. 

My Father, then, like an old divine, concen- 
trated his thoughts upon the intellectual part of 
faith. In his obsession about me, he believed 
that if my brain could be kept unaffected by any 
of the tempting errors of the age, and my heart 
centred in the adoring love of God, all would be 
well with me in perpetuity. He was still con- 
vinced that by intensely directing my thoughts, 
he could compel them to flow in a certain chan- 
nel, since he had not begun to learn the lesson, 
so mournful for saintly men of his complexion, 
that 'Wirtue would not be virtue, could it be 
given by one fellow creature to another." He 
had recognised, with reluctance, that holiness 
was not hereditary, but he continued to hope 
that it might be compulsive. I was still 'Hhe 
child of many prayers," and it was not to be 
conceded that these prayers could remain un- 
answered. 

335 



FATHER AND SON 

The great panacea was now, as always, the 
study of the Bible, and this my Father never 
ceased to urge upon me. He presented to me 
a copy of Dean Alford's edition of the Greek 
New Testament, in four great volumes, and these 
he had had so magnificently bound in full morocco 
that the work shone on my poor shelf of sixpenny 
poets like a duchess among dairy-maids. He 
extracted from me a written promise that I would 
translate and meditate upon a portion of the 
Greek text every morning before I started for 
business. This promise I presently failed to 
keep, my good intentions being undermined by 
an invincible ennui; I concealed the dereliction 
from him, and the sense that I was deceiving my 
Father ate into my conscience like a canker. 
But the dilemma was now before me that I must 
either deceive my Father in such things or para- 
lyse my own character. 

My growing distaste for the Holy Scriptures 
began to occupy my thoughts, and to surprise 
as much as it scandalised me. My desire was to 
continue to dehght in those sacred pages, for 
which I still had an instinctive veneration. Yet 
I could not but observe the difference between the 
zeal with which I snatched at a volume of Carlyle 
or Ruskin — since these magicians were now first 
revealing themselves to me — and the increas- 
336 



FATHER AND SON 

ing languor with which I took up Alford for my 
daily "passage." Of course, although I did not 
know it, and beUeved my reluctance to be sinful, 
the real reason why I now found the Bible so 
difficult to read was my familiarity with its con- 
tents. These had the colourless triteness of a 
story retold a hundred times. I longed for 
something new, something that would gratify 
curiosity and excite surprise. Whether the facts 
and doctrines contained in the Bible were true 
or false was not the question that appealed to 
me; it was rather that they had been presented 
to me so often and had sunken into me so far 
that, as some one has said, they "lay bedridden 
in the dormitory of the soul," and made no im- 
pression of any kind upon me. 

It often amazed me, and I am still unable to 
imderstand the fact, that my Father, through 
his long life — or till nearly the close of it — con- 
tinued to take an eager pleasure in the text of 
the Bible. As I think I have already said, be- 
fore he reached middle life, he had committed 
practically the whole of it to memory, and if 
started anywhere, even in a Minor Prophet, he 
could go on without a break as long as ever he 
was inclined for that exercise. He, therefore, 
at no time can have been assailed by the satiety 
of which I have spoken, and that it came so soon 
337 



FATHER AND SON 

to me I must take simply as an indication of 
difference of temperament. It was not possible, 
even through the dark glass of correspondence, 
to deceive his eagle eye in this matter, and his 
suspicions accordingly took another turn. He 
conceived me to have become, or to be becom- 
ing, a victim of 'Hhe infidelity of the age." 

In this new difficulty, he appealed to forms of 
modem hterature by the side of which the least at- 
tractive pages of Leviticus or Deuteronomy struck 
me as even thrilling. In particular, he urged 
upon me a work, then just published, called 
''The Continuity of Scripture" by Wilham Page 
Wood, afterwards Lord Chancellor Hatherley. 
I do not know why he supposed that the lucu- 
brations of an exemplary lawyer, deHvered in a 
style that was like the trickhng sawdust, would 
succeed in rousing emotions which the glorious 
rhetoric of the Orient had failed to awaken; but 
Page Wood had been a Sunday School teacher for 
thirty years, and my Father was always imduly 
impressed by the acumen of pious barristers. 

As time went on, and I grew older and more 
independent in mind, my Father's anxiety about 
what he called "the pitfalls and snares which 
surround on every hand the thoughtless giddy 
youth of London" became extremely painful to 
himself. By harping in private upon these ''pit- 
338 



FATHER AND SON 

falls" — which brought to my imagination a fimny 
rough woodcut in an old edition of Bunyan, where 
a devil was seen capering over a sort of box let 
neatly into the ground — he worked himself up 
into a frame of mind which was not a httle irri- 
tating to his hapless correspondent, who was 
now ''snared" indeed, limed by the pen like a 
bird by the feet, and could not by any means es- 
cape. To a peck or a flutter from the bird the 
implacable fowler would reply: 

"You charge me with being suspicious, and 
I fear I cannot deny the charge. But I can ap- 
peal to your own sensitive and thoughtful mind 
for a considerable allowance. My deep and tender 
love for you; your youth and inexperience; the 
examples of other young men ; your distance from 
parental counsel; our absolute and painful ig- 
norance of all the details of your daily life, ex- 
cept what you yourself tell us: — try to throw 
yourself into the standing of a parent, and say if 
my suspiciousness is unreasonable. I rejoicingly 
acknowledge that from all I see you are pursuing 
a virtuous, steady, worthy course. One good 
thing my suspiciousness does: — ever and anon it 
brings out from you assurances, which greatly 
refresh and comfort me. And, again, it carries 
me ever to God's Throne of Grace on your behalf. 
339 



FATHER AND SON 

Holy Job suspected that his sons might have sinned 
and cursed God in their heart. Was not his sus- 
picion much like mine, grounded on the same 
reasons, and productive of the same results? 
For it drove him to God in intercession. I have 
adduced the example of this Patriarch before, 
and he will endure being looked at again." 

In fact. Holy Job continued to be frequently 
looked at, and for this Patriarch I came to ex- 
perience a hatred which was as venomous as it 
was undeserved. But what youth of eighteen 
would wilhngly be compared with the sons of Job? 
And indeed, for my part, I felt much more like 
that justly exasperated character, Elihu the Buz- 
ite, of the kindred of Ram. 

As time went on, the peculiar strain of in- 
quisition was relaxed, and I endured fewer and 
fewer of the torments of religious correspond- 
ence. Nothing abides in one tense projection, 
and my Father, resolute as he was, had other 
preoccupations. His orchids, his microscope, 
his physiological researches, his interpretations 
of prophecy, filled up the hours of his active and 
strenuous life, and, out of his sight, I became not 
indeed out of his mind, but no longer ceaselessly 
in the painful foreground of it. Yet, although 
the reiteration of his anxiety might weary him a 
340 



FATHER AND SON 

little as it had wearied me well nigh to groans of 
despair, there was not the shghtest change in his 
real attitude towards the subject or towards me. 

I have already had occasion to say that he 
had nothing of the mystic or the visionary 
about him. At certain times and on certain 
points, he greatly desired that signs and wonders, 
such as had astonished and encouraged the in- 
fancy of the Christian Church, might again be 
vouchsafed to it, but he did not pretend to see 
such miracles himself, or give the slightest cre- 
dence to others who asserted that they did. He 
often congratulated himself on the fact that al- 
though his mind dwelt so constantly on spiritual 
matters it was never betrayed into any suspen- 
sion of the rational functions. 

Cross-examination by letter slackened, but on 
occasion of my brief and usually summer visits 
to Devonshire I suffered acutely from my Father's 
dialectical appetites. He was surroimded by 
peasants, on whom the teeth of his arguments 
could find no purchase. To him, in that intel- 
lectual Abdera, even an unwilling j^outh from 
London offered opportimities of pleasant contest. 
He would declare himself ready, nay eager, for 
argument. With his mental sleeves turned up, 
he would adopt a fighting attitude, and challenge 
me to a round on any portion of the Scheme of 
341 



FATHER AND SON 

Grace. His alacrity was dreadful to me, his well 
aimed blows fell on what was rather a bladder 
or a pillow than a vivid antagonist. 

He was, indeed, most unfairly handicapped, — I 
was naked, he in a suit of chain armoiu-, — for he 
had adopted a method which I thought, and must 
still think, exceedingly unfair. He assumed 
that he had private knowledge of the Divine Will, 
and he would meet my temporising arguments by 
asseverations, — ''So sure as my God liveth:" or 
by appeals to a higher authority — ''But what 
does my Lord tell me in Paul's Letter to the 
Philippians?" It was the prerogative of his faith 
to know, and of his character to overpower, ob- 
jection; between these two millstones I was rap- 
idly ground to powder. 

These "discussions," as they were rather iron- 
ically called, invariably ended for me in disaster. 
I was driven out of my papier-mdche fastnesses, 
my canvas walls rocked at the first peal from my 
Father's clarion, and the foe pursued me across 
the plains of Jericho imtil I lay down ignomin- 
iously and covered my face. I seemed to be 
pushed with horns of iron, such as those which 
Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah prepared for the 
encouragement of Ahab. 

When I acknowledged defeat and cried for 
quarter, my Father would become radiant, and I 
342 



FATHER AND SON 

still seem to hear the sound of his full voice, so 
thiilling, so warm, so painful to my over-strained 
nerves, bursting forth in a sort of benediction at 
the end of each of these one-sided contentions, 
with "I bow my knees unto the Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, that He would grant you, ac- 
cording to the riches of his glory, to be strength- 
ened with might by His Spirit in the inner man; 
that Christ may dwell in your heart by faith; 
that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may 
be able to comprehend with all saints what is 
the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, 
and to know the love of Christ which passeth 
knowledge, that you might be filled with the ful- 
ness of God." 

Thus solemn, and thus ceremonious was my 
Father apt to become, without a moment's warn- 
ing, on plain and domestic occasions; abruptly 
brimming over with emotion like a basin which 
an imseen flow of water has filled and over- 
filled. 

I earnestly desire that no trace of that absurd 
self-pity which is apt to taint recollections of this 
nature should give falsity to mine. My Father, 
let me say once more, had other interests than 
those of his rehgion. In particular, at this time, 
he took to painting in water-colours in the open 
air, and he resumed the assiduous study of bot- 
343 



FATHER AND SON 

any. He was no fanatical monomaniac. Never- 
theless, there was, in everything he did and said, 
the central purpose present. He acknowledged 
it plainly; "with me," he confessed, "every ques- 
tion assumes a Divine standpoint and is not ade- 
quately answered if the judgment-seat of Christ 
is not kept in sight." 

This was maintained whether the subject under 
discussion was poetry, or society, or the Prussian 
war with Austria, or the stamen of a wild flower. 
Once at least, he was himself conscious of the 
fatiguing effect on my temper of this insistency, 
for, raising his great brown eyes with a flash of 
laughter in them, he closed the Bible suddenly 
after a very lengthy disquisition, and quoted his 
Virgil to startling effect : — 

Claudite jam rivos, pueri: sat prata biberunt. 

The insistency of his religious conversation 
was, probably, the less incomprehensible to me 
on account of the evangelical training to which 
I had been so systematically subjected. It was, 
however, none the less intolerably irksome, and 
would have been exasperating, I believe, even 
to a nature in which a powerful and genuine piety 
was inherent. To my own, in which a feeble and 
imitative faith was expiring, it was deeply vex- 
344 



FATHER AND SON 

atious. It led, alas! to a great deal of bowing 
in the house of Rimmon, to much hypocritical in- 
genuity in drawing my Father's attention away, 
if possible, as the terrible subject was seen to be 
looming and approaching. In this my step- 
mother would aid and abet, sometimes producing 
incongruous themes, hkely to attract my Father 
aside, with a skill worthy of a parlour conjurer, 
and much to my admiration. If, however, she 
was not imwilling to come, in this way, to the 
support of my feebleness, there was no open 
collusion between us. She always described my 
Father, when she was alone with me, admiringly, 
as one '^ whose trumpet gave no uncertain sound." 
There was not a tinge of infidelity upon her can- 
did mind, but she was human, and I think that 
now and then she was extremely bored. 

My Father was entirely devoid of the prudence 
which turns away its eyes and passes as rapidly 
as possible in the opposite direction. The pe- 
culiar kind of drama in which every sort of social 
discomfort is welcomed rather than that the char- 
acters should be happy when guilty of '^ acting 
a he," was not invented in those days, and there 
can hardly be imagined a figure more remote 
from my Father than Ibsen. Yet when I came, 
at a far later date, to read The Wild Duck, mem- 
ories of the embarrassing household of my infancy 
345 



FATHER AND SON 

helped me to realise Gregers Werle, with his de- 
termination to pull the veil of illusion away 
from every compromise that makes hfe bearable. 

I was docile, I was plausible, I was anything but 
combative; if my Father could have persuaded 
himself to let me alone, if he could merely have 
been willing to leave my subterfuges and my ex- 
planations unanalysed, all would have been well. 
But he refused to see any difference in tempera- 
ment between a lad of twenty and a sage of sixty. 
He had no vital sympathy for youth, which in 
itself had no charm for him. He had no com- 
passion for the weaknesses of immaturity, and 
his one and only anxiety was to be at the end of 
his spiritual journey, safe with me in the house 
where there are many mansions. The incidents of 
human life upon the road to glory were less than 
nothing to him. 

My Father was very fond of defining what was 
his own attitude at this time, and he was never 
tired of urging the same ambition upon me. He 
regarded himself as the faithful steward of a 
Master who might return at any moment, and 
who would require to find everything ready for 
his convenience. That master was God, with 
whom my Father seriously believed himself to 
be in relations much more confidential than those 
vouchsafed to ordinary pious persons. He awaited, 
346 



FATHER AND SON 

with anxious hope, '^the coming of the Lord," an 
event which he still frequently believed to be immi- 
nent. He would calculate, by reference to pro- 
phecies in the Old and New Testament, the exact 
date of this event; the date would pass, without 
the expected Advent, and he would be more than 
disappointed, — he would be incensed. Then he 
would understand that he must have made some 
slight error in calculation, and the pleasures of 
anticipation would recommence. 

Me in all this he used as a kind of inferior 
coadjutor, much as a responsible and upper 
servant might use a footboy. I, also, must be 
watching; it was not important that I should be 
seriously engaged in any affairs of my own. I 
must be ready for the Master's coming; and my 
Father's incessant cross-examination was made in 
the spirit of a responsible servant who fidgets 
lest some humble but essential piece of household 
work has been neglected. 

My holidays, however, and all my personal re- 
lations with my Father were poisoned by this 
insistency. I was never at my ease in his com- 
pany; I never knew when I might not be sub- 
jected to a series of searching questions which I 
should not be allowed to evade. Meanwhile, on 
every other stage of experience I was gaining the 
rehance upon self and the respect for the opinion 
347 



FATHER AND SON 

of others which come naturally to a young man 
of sober habits who earns his own living and lives 
his own life. For this kind of independence my 
Father had no respect or consideration, when 
questions of religion were introduced, although he 
handsomely conceded it on other points. And 
now first there occurred to me the reflection, which 
in years to come I was to repeat over and over, 
with an ever sadder emphasis, — what a charming 
companion, what a delightful parent, what a cour- 
teous and engaging friend, my Father would have 
been, and would pre-eminently have been to me, 
if it had not been for this stringent piety which 
ruined it all. 

Let me speak plainly. After my long experi- 
ence, after my patience and forbearance, I have 
surely the right to protest against the imtruth 
(would that I could apply to it any other word!) 
that evangelical religion, or any rehgion in a 
violent form, is a wholesome or valuable or desir- 
able adjimct to human hfe. It divides heart from 
heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal in the 
barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent 
affections, all the genial play of hfe, all the ex- 
quisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, 
all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged 
for what is harsh and void and negative. It en- 
courages a stern and ignorant spirit of condem- 
348 



FATHER AND SON 

nation; it throws altogether out of gear the 
healthy movement of the conscience; it invents 
virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins 
which are no sins at all, but which darken the 
heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of re- 
morse. There is something horrible, if we will 
bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that 
can do nothing with this pathetic and fugitive 
existence of ours but treat it as if it were the un- 
comfortable ante-chamber to a palace which no 
one has explored and of the plan of which we 
know absolutely nothing. My Father, it is true, 
beheved that he was intimately acquainted with 
the form and furniture of this habitation, and he 
wished me to think of nothing else but of the ad- 
vantages of an eternal residence in it. 

Then came a moment when my self-sufficiency 
revolted against the police-inspection to which my 
"views" were incessantly subjected. There was 
a morning, in the hot-house at home, among the 
gorgeous waxen orchids which reminded my 
Father of the tropics in his youth, when my for- 
bearance or my timidity gave way. The ener- 
vated air, soaked with the intoxicating perfumes 
of all those voluptuous flowers, may have been 
partly responsible for my outburst. My Father 
had once more put to me the customary interroga- 
tory. Was I "walking closely with God?" Was 
349 



FATHER AND SON 

my sense of the efficacy of the Atonement clear 
and sound? Had the Holy Scriptures still their 
full authority with me? My replies on this occa- 
sion were violent and hysterical. I have no clear 
recollection what it was that I said, — I desire not 
to recall the whimpering sentences in which I 
begged to be let alone, in which I demanded the 
right to think for myself, in which I repudiated 
the idea that my Father was responsible to God 
for my secret thoughts and my most intimate con- 
victions. 

He made no answer; I broke from the odor- 
ous furnace of the conservatory, and buried 
my face in the cold grass upon the lawn. My 
visit to Devonshire, already near its close, was 
hurried to an end. I scarcely arrived in London 
before the following letter furiously despatched 
in the track of the fugitive, buried itself Uke an 
arrow in my heart: — 

"When your sainted Mother died, she not only 
tenderly committed you to God, but left you 
also as a solemn charge to me, to bring you up in 
the nurture and admonition of the Lord. That 
responsibihty I have sought constantly to keep 
before me: I can truly aver that it has been ever 
before me — in my choice of a housekeeper, in 
my choice of a school, in my ordering of your 
350 



FATHER AND SON 

holidays, in my choice of a second wife, in my 
choice of an occupation for you, in my choice of 
a residence for you; and in multitudes of lesser 
things — I have sought to act for you, not in the 
light of this present world, but with a view to 
Eternity. 

"Before your childhood was past, there seemed 
God's manifest blessing on our care; for you 
seemed truly converted to Him; you confessed, 
in solemn baptism, that you had died and had 
been raised with Christ; and you were received 
with joy into the bosom of the Church of God, as 
one alive from the dead. 

''All this filled my heart with thankfulness and 
joy, whenever I thought of you: — how could it 
do otherwise? And when I left you in London, 
on that dreary winter evening, my heart, full of 
sorrowing love, found its refuge and its resource 
in this thought, — that you were one of the lambs 
of Christ's flock; sealed with the Holy Spirit as 
His; renewed in heart to hoUness, in the image 
of God. 

"For a while, all appeared to go on fairly well: 
we yearned, indeed, to discover more of heart in 
your allusions to religious matters, but your ex- 
pressions towards us were fihal and affectionate; 
your conduct, so far as we could see, was moral 
and becoming; you mingled with the people of 
351 



FATHER AND SON 

God, spoke of occasional delight and profit in 
His ordinances; and employed your talents in 
service to Him. 

"But of late, and specially during the past 
year, there has become manifest a rapid progress 
towards evil. (I must beg you here to pause, 
and again to look to God for grace to weigh what 
I am about to say; or else wrath will rise.) 

"When you came to us in the summer, the 
heavy blow fell full upon me; and I discovered 
how very far you had departed from God. It 
was not that you had yielded to the strong tide 
of youthful blood, and had fallen a victim to 
fleshly lusts; in that case, however sad, your en- 
Hghtened conscience would have spoken loudly, 
and you would have found your way back to the 
blood which cleanseth us from all sin, to humble 
confession and self-abasement, to forgiveness and 
to re-communion with God. It was not this; it 
was worse. It was that horrid, insidious infi- 
dehty, which had already worked in yom- mind 
and heart with terrible energy. Far worse, I 
say, because this was sapping the very founda- 
tions of faith, on which all true godHness, all real 
rehgion, must rest. 

"Nothing seemed left to which I could appeal. 
We had, I found, no common ground. The Holy 
Scriptures had no longer any authority: you had 
352 



FATHER AND SON 

taught yourself to evade their inspiration. Any 
particular Oracle of God which pressed you, you 
could easily explain away; even the very char- 
acter of God you weighed in your balance of 
fallen reason, and fashioned it accordingly. You 
were thus sailing down the rapid tide of time 
towards Eternity, without a single authoritative 
guide (having cast your chart overboard), except 
what you might fashion and forge on your own 
anvil, — except what you might guess, in fact. 

''Do not tliink I am speaking in passion, and 
using unwarrantable strength of words. If the 
written Word is not absolutely authoritative, 
what do we know of God? What more than we 
can infer, that is, guess, — as the thoughtful 
heathens guessed, — Plato, Socrates, Cicero, — from 
dim and mute surrounding phenomena? What do 
we know of Eternity? Of our relations to God? 
Especially of the relations of a sinner to God? 
What of reconciliation? What of the capital 
question — How can a God of perfect spotless 
rectitude deal with me, a corrupt sinner, who 
have trampled on those of His laws which were 
even written on my conscience? . . . 

"This dreadful conduct of yours I had intended, 

after much prayer, to pass by in entire silence; 

but your apparently sincere inquiries after the 

cause of my sorrow have led me to go to the root 

353 



FATHER AND SON 

of the matter, and I could not stop short oi the 
development contained in this letter. It is with 
pain, not in anger, that I send it ; hoping that you 
may be induced to review the whole coui'se, of 
which this is only a stage, before God. If this 
grace were granted to you, oh! how joyfully 
should I bmy all the past, and again have sweet 
and tender fellowship with my beloved Son, as 
of old." 

The reader who has done me the favour to 
follow this record of the clash of two tempera- 
ments will not fail to perceive the crowning im- 
portance of the letter from which I have just made 
a long quotation. It sums up, with the closest 
logic, the whole history of the situation, and I 
may leave it to form the epigraph of this httle 
book. 

All that I need further say is to point out that 
when such defiance is offered to the intelligence 
of a thoughtful and honest young man with the 
normal impulses of his twenty-one years, there 
are but two alternatives. Either he must cease 
to think for himself; or his individualism must 
be instantly confirmed, and the necessity of re- 
ligious independence must be emphasised. 

No compromise, it is seen, was offered; no 
proposal of a truce would have been acceptable. 
354 



FATHER AND SON 

It was a case of ''Ever)rthing or Nothing''; and 
thus desperately challenged, the young man's 
conscience threw off once for all the yoke of his 
''dedication," and, as respectfully as he could, 
without parade or remonstrance, he took a human 
being's privilege to fashion his inner hfe for him- 
self. 



355 



^' 



LBSVH 5£p ^Q y,,,2 



LBFe '06 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



